MAKING LENT 2010: A WEEKLY LENTEN RESOURCE FOR THE PEOPLE OF ST. MARY’S AND THE ST. MARY’S COMMUNITY

The Fourth Week of Lent: Tsitsi Ella Jaji – The Mystery of Friendship

I’ve been spending this week with one of my dearest friends from Zimbabwe. I was born and spent my childhood there, and share with many people of my generation vivid memories of the immense hopefulness and joy of the years immediately following independence in 1980. And like millions of Zimbabweans who have moved away in the wake of economic and political upheavals, my friend Elinore and I carry with us a jumble of feelings about our present “diaspora”: a deep longing for home, a sense that what we remember as home no longer exists, a strange guilt at having left our loved ones to struggle there, and a stubborn nagging conviction that God will restore the fortunes of our little piece of Zion. And this week we have spent hours trading stories with each other, many about our joint adventures as teenagers playing in orchestras and rolling our eyes at our teachers, and many more about things we didn’t share back then. We haven’t seen each other in 13 years, and haven’t spent more than a couple days together in 17 years. It took a tragedy to bring us together again, and before I arrived at her home I wondered how it would feel to resume our conversation, and perhaps even whether we could.

Jacaranda trees in Montagu Ave, [Harare], Zimbabwe 1975 by Graham Bould

Last November her son passed away in a terribly unexpected way. When he was born she asked me to be his godmother, and over the last nine years I’ve followed her stories about his funny expressions, unique culinary creations, and inappropriately hilarious skype icons. I always imagined that I would come and visit them in person, just as soon as I saved up enough money for the trip to their new home in Sweden…and it always seemed like too much of an extravagance, the thing I would do the next summer, or after graduation, or after I had paid off my student loans. And then the news came that he was gone. I am not sure what was more devastating, knowing that I had missed out on the chance to know him any better than through our brief electronic correspondence or knowing that my dear Elinore was going through such an excruciating loss so far away. We have spent lots of time on skype since then, and this week we finally can be together. Some of our time has been spent looking through his creations: everything from astonishingly detailed storybooks about space to an odd little angel he made for his Mum which now perches atop a cupboard she has made for his memories and creations. And while fingering his things and talking quietly of the horror of discovering his death released heavy tears I have been astonished by how much time we have also spent laughing, recognizing in each other the girls we were, reminding each other of the mad exploits that sealed our place among the ranks of the arch-nerds in high school. And filling in the gaps about life since then: the bitter struggles of illness, relationships, homesickness. It has been a profoundly healing time. For Elinore, but also for me. A time to heal from an ache that I did not even know was ailing me.

This lent has been an odd season for me. I began it deciding to come to one of the short day-time impositions of ashes rather than the evening gathering where there would have been more people. Nothing came to mind to give up, and so after deciding that Facebook was probably the greatest distraction in my life, I announced on my page that I would be curtailing my online presence for Lent. It was clear within about 36 hours that I had not been granted the grace to keep this vow. And since then I’ve come to see that friendship, sustained through online applications or expensive plane tickets to Sweden, is one of the ways through which the Great Love that Julian of Norwich sometimes called Our Mother Jesus is revealed most poignantly. I remember the many stories of intimate friendship in our tradition: Jonathan and David; Elizabeth and Mary; Jesus and Mary Magdelene. And I think that in enduring friendships we truly taste and see how good communion with that Mother Jesus might be. I am thankful beyond words for the friendship I have known with Elinore. And I suppose if there is a ‘message’ in this reflection it is an invitation to see what may be revealed to you in the great mystery of friendship.