On the evening of the first day of the week, when the doors were locked, where the disciples were, for fear of the Jews, Jesus came and stood in their midst and said to them, “Peace be with you.” When he had said this, he showed them his hands and his side. The disciples rejoiced when they saw the Lord.” (John 20.19-20)
Writing about a largely forgotten part of American history, Christina Baker Kline, in her book Orphan Train, tells the story of the hundreds of thousands of abandoned children who were loaded on trains on the East Coast and shipped to the farmlands of the Midwest from 1854 to 1929, where they were presented to prospective foster parents who would take them into their homes where they would be treated either as members of the family or as servants of the family.
In one particularly moving part of the book, Kline describes the scene as the children prepare to be paraded in front of potential parents. She writes, “Ahead of us, Mrs. Scatcherd stands beside a large oak door, hands collapsed in front of her. When we reach her, we gather around in a semicircle, the older girls holding babies and the younger children holding hands, the boys’ hands tufted in their pockets.”
“Mrs. Stacherd takes off her glasses. ‘We have reached our destination. From here, the Lord willing, you will disperse to families who need you and want you.’ She clears her throat. ‘Now remember, not everyone will find a match right away. This is to be expected, and nothing to worry about. If you do not match now you will simply board the train with Mr. Curran and me, and we will travel to another station about an hour from here. And if you do not find placement there, you will come with us to the next town.’”
Vivian, one of the orphans and the narrator of the story, allows us to hear her thoughts after Mrs. Stacherd has spoken to the orphans. “Maybe, I think, someone here will want me. Maybe I’ll have a life I’ve never dared to imagine, in a bright, snug house where there is plenty to eat–warm cake and milky tea with as much as sugar as I please. But I am quaking as I make my way up the stairs to the stage.”
“The girl beside me makes a low noise like a dog’s whine and skips her hand into mine. It’s as cold and damp as the back of a toad. ‘Don’t worry, we’ll be all right.’ I begin, but she gives me a look of such desperation that my words trail off. As we watch people line up and begin to mount the steps to the stage, I feel like one of the cows in the agricultural show my granddad took me to in Kinvara.”
As the selection process unfolds before us, we feel the terror of the children, uncertainty and unease filling their hearts in the face of their unknown future. Alone and afraid, some cry; others cringe before the crowd. With no control over her own life, forced to put her life in the hands of fate, Vivian clutches a small cross that she wears on a simple string around her neck, the only memento of a childhood that soon will be no more than a memory.
It is good for us to enter into Vivian’s world as we seek to understand the scriptural text that we study today, a passage in which we find the forlorn and forsaken followers of the Galilean huddled in a dark room, hiding from the brutes who had killed the one they called Rabbi, horror as they remember the past days, terror as they look to the days ahead. They are like orphans left to the mercy of the heavens, unsure of the next step to take, unsuited for the whiplash of life.
Later called the cenacle, better known as the upper room, that place where the once bold but now broken disciples burrow like wounded animals left from the hunt, becomes a metaphor for the space where any of us may find ourselves after similarly being beaten and bruised by life, abandoned to this abode of isolation and infirmity.
When understood in this way, the cenacle in Jerusalem is not restricted by time or geography, but is found in any country and in every zip code, the only criterion being that it has four walls that surround us, trapping us in a place of tribulation and confining us to a room of uncertainties. There, in that prison cell of hell, we feel utterly alone and forever forgotten.
In our personal cenacle, we feel every emotion the disciples felt, frightened by outside forces we cannot control, terrified by interior threats we cannot name. The sounds of the cenacle are always the same, wherever it is found, cries and curses, tears and tirades, pleas and prayers filling the empty space with the howls of frustration, desperation, and exasperation like rising water out to drown us in some locked chamber.
The cenacle is the hospital room where the sick person lies in an unfamiliar bed, the pain turning his or her body from a friend into a foe, with uncaring machines filling the silence with clinical beeps like the indecipherable code of a telegraph clicker. There, with sickness stealing the old self and putting in its place a stranger, a person feels alone, even with the noise of the hallway filtering into the room, or with the chipper well-wishes of visitors attempting to camouflage the smell of sickness.
The cenacle is the jail cell where the inmate is confined, no longer seen as a human person but as a docket number, forgotten and forsaken, hearing nothing but the ancient cogwheels of a bureaucratic system grinding slowly in the background, the yellowed-calendar on the wall just as slowly turning its thumbed pages, and the broken bottle of hope spilling its last few drops onto the cold concrete flooring.
The cenacle is the classroom where the poor student is persecuted, where the unpopular person is bullied, and where the rank and file are tabbed like manila folders in a file cabinet, with the in crowd at the front and the out crowd pushed to the back of the drawer. Entering the hallway each morning, the outsider braces for a day of insults, assaults, and fault-finding. Outnumbered and outflanked, he or she feels the steady erosion of self, of self-esteem, of self-preservation.
The cenacle is the drug dive of the addled addict, its walls closing in, its door allowing entrance, but no exit. Battling demons who have greater strength and uglier evil, the person succumbs to the easy fix, the quick high, or the cheap thrill, anything to escape these four walls that steadily compress, making it impossible to breathe, impossible to move, impossible to keep on living.
The cenacle is the stale living room where the unemployed man or woman sits or sleeps, the TV blaring in the background its promises of the best dog food, the best socks, and for sure the best meds, all the while the one living soul in the tired room hoping and praying that something shows up soon so that food is on the table and so that the sinking feeling of despair leaves the stomach. Looking around the room, the person sees nothing but defeat, despondency, and crushed dreams.
These cenacles, and so many others just like them, can be found everywhere and, if we have not found ourselves in one of them yet, we will at some point, if for no other reason than our bodies die, our plans fall apart, and our marriages end for no good reason, finding ourselves inside four walls that feel for the world like a prison, not only for our bodies, but for our spirits.
So, it is important that we continue to read the story of the disheartened and dismayed disciples huddled in that upper room on that dark night, having escaped by the skin of their teeth their own deaths, but forced to watch from a safe distance the brutal death of their friend and mentor, the Galilean Teacher. Their lives as they knew them have come to an end and they are unsure of where they will go from here. Tonight, they are locked in the cenacle, the place with no tomorrows.
Then, without explanation, without expectation, the Teacher stands before them, the lock on the door still secure, but his presence unhindered by any such deterrence or contrivance, and he speaks to them, his voice familiar and friendly, and he says to them, “Peace be with you.” Unsure of their eyes, less sure of their ears, they stand still, like pillars of salt, until he says a second time to them, “Peace be with you.”
Three times he will say the same thing to them, until they believe, until they see, even if they have to reach out with their hands, touching the wounds on his body, belief battling disbelief, hope hammered by hopelessness, possibility compromised by impossibility. “Peace be with you,” he said, his words chosen with care, his intention clear, his message certain, his words communicating his peace, his presence, and his power over all that imprisoned them within these four walls.
And in that moment, the axis of their world shifted again, this time restoring steadiness and strength, as they see they are not alone, but they have their leader with them, battle-scarred and speared, but fully alive, more than alive, radiating an energy and a light and a force that obliterated the darkness and the despair and the doubts contained within the walls of the cenacle.
Unable to explain the turn of events, except by the hand of God, they rejoice, take the first decent breath in days, and allow the thought, fragile as a newborn baby, that maybe there will be a tomorrow. Believing they were doomed, like condemned men on death row, suddenly they feel their fears falling away, even as they feel their hopes enkindling.
In the movie “News of the World,” Tom Hanks plays the part of an ex-Confederate officer, Captain Kidd, who has lost everything because of the war, including his wife, his print shop, and his place in the world. He travels from town to town in Texas reading the news of the world to illiterate farm people, explaining to them that he understands the tough times that they find themselves in. “Yeah,” he says to the crowds, “we’re all hurting. These are difficult times.”
As he travels, he comes across a young girl who had been kidnapped by Kiowas six years earlier, then retaken, a black man commissioned to take the girl back to relatives in a far-off part of the state. But the man has been murdered, hung from a tree, with the terrified girl hiding in the woods nearby. A letter Captain Kidd finds explains the girl is Johanna and she was to be taken back to her aunt and uncle, her only living relatives.
Meeting a woman named Mrs. Gannett who can speak Kiowa to the girl, Captain Kidd learns from the woman that the child has no home. Also, no Kiowa family because they’ve also been killed. Mrs. Gannett says to Kidd, “This child is an orphan twice over.” Captain Kidd nods and sadly says, “Nobody wants her.”
Captain Kidd, knowing the dangers ahead and that the trip is four hundred miles long, decides to bring the young girl to her relatives, only to find when they arrive weeks later that the uncle and aunt are reluctant to take the girl, since she was raised by the Kiowas and can’t speak English. Leaving Johanna with them, Captain Kidd goes to San Antonio to visit his wife’s grave.
Afterwards, he decides he’ll raise the girl himself, so he returns to Castroville to find Johanna tied to a post in the yard because she has tried to run away. Her uncle complains because she won’t work. Captain Kidd unties her and says to her, “You belong with me.” They leave and he raises her as his own daughter, giving her a home and ensuring she won’t be thrice orphaned.
“I will not leave you orphans.” This was a promise the Galilean Teacher called Jesus made to his followers just a day before his own death on the cross, assuring them that whatever the future held for him, he would not abandon them. He would remain, one way or another. And it was a promise he kept, coming to them in the cenacle, the last place in the world where they expected to see him, this room with the heavy lock on the door, this place where their hopes went to die.
And from that dark night when he found his disciples in the cenacle to the dark nights of our soul when he finds us in our cenacles, the same Risen Lord continues to walk into these locked spaces where we find ourselves, bringing back hope to our hearts, offering peace to our weary souls, and promising his own presence in our solitary confinement.
This is the message that the Galilean, risen from his own tomb, wants us to feel in our bones, banished as we are behind these four walls, that we are not alone, that he is here with us, that whatever the fears or pains or setbacks we have brought with us into this room, he will not abandon us. While we may feel many things, the one thing we must not feel is that we are orphans.
And with that sure knowledge, that he is with us, the cenacle becomes not a scary place, but a sacred place, the room where the Risen One stands beside us, breathing his spirit into us, begging us to believe again.
–Jeremy Myers
Sunday Brunch 