"It Is Better to Speak"

 Homily of Dominican Volunteers USA  Codirector Megan Rupp from  DVUSA Closing Retreat Mass in July 2018:

DVUSA Codirector Megan Rupp

When I was preparing for this over the last couple weeks, I was laboring over what to say. I thought long and hard about what was said at the closing mass of my volunteer year. I was granted some comfort when I realized that I didn’t remember any of it and neither will you likely.

At your Orientation, I failed to mention to mention that we Dominicans recognize St. Mary of Magdala as the Patroness of the Order as she was the first preacher of the Good News. It is fitting that we would be celebrating her feast day as we prepare to send you back out into the world but in the lives that you order for yourselves.

It is sometimes challenging to imagine the stories that we find in scripture. Take the Gospel that we just heard as an example. There is much that we don’t know about the life of Mary Magdalene. We know that she was with Jesus during some or all of his ministry. We know that she heard Jesus’ teachings. We know that Jesus was her Lord and friend whom she loved.  We know that she was with Jesus through his passion, death, and now resurrection.

Let’s imagine. This woman has watched her friend go on trial, be beaten, mocked, and sentenced to death. At the foot of the cross, she watches as her friend is murdered at the hands of the Roman government.  In her grief she goes to visit his grave. This brings us to this Gospel. She gets to the grave and its empty.  Again she is overcome with unbelievable grief. She has seen firsthand the violent capacity of an oppressive power. She knows they are willing to murder her friend, for her it is not a hard stretch to imagine that they would also steal his body. We remember that Mary heard Jesus talk about rising from the dead; she has faith in knowing that he is her Lord. Nevertheless, rather than believing that her Lord is in fact the Lord, history has taught her that unjust systems often use fear as a tool of oppression. She knows that people in power maintain power by adding insult to injury.  She goes to the man she believes to be the gardener and she begs for the smallest shred of respect and for him to at least tell her where they have placed her friend’s body.

Is this hard for us to imagine? Probably not. We see it when our military destabilizes governments through war and violence, then we limit or outright refuse to welcome refugees that have been displaced by our actions. We see it when women share their stories of sexual violence only to be ignored or asked what they did to solicit those acts of violence. We see it when housing restrictions require an individual experiencing homelessness to be sober in order to gain access to public housing even though research has shown that an individual cannot successfully address an addiction or mental illness without stable housing. We see it when a Chicago police officer fires all 16 rounds of his 9mm into a 17-year-old, black, LeQuan McDonald who is holding a pocketknife and is walking away. You can likely guess the end of that story, it continues with this trend of insult to injury.  Initially LeQuan McDonald was criminalized, it was ruled as a justified shooting and was covered up by city officials until dash cam footage was released to the public.  

We can empathize with Mary in this moment of pain, grief, and frustration. We can empathize because we have been with her outside of that empty tomb.

Similar to Mary in this moment, we might be asking ourselves how will I move forward working for justice and equity knowing the oppressive systems that exist in our world? Lucky for us this Gospel story doesn’t end with just an empty tomb. We, too, have seen the Lord. So we set out just like our patroness, St. Mary of Magdela and preach the Gospel of our experiences. We tell the whole story.  To quote Audrey Lorde, “When we speak we are afraid our words will not be heard nor welcomed. But when we are silent, we are still afraid. So it is better to speak.”