A couple of years back we did a kind of "Alternative" Tenebrae service here at Robinson. Andy and Hannah Goodliff came over and joined us for that. This weekend they did a Tenebrae of their own, adapting our basic idea and adding some fresh ideas of their own. Looks great. Go here for their version
Milton writes on his Lent blog:
Age is a funny thing. I’m about thirty years older than (my nephew) and yet that distance wasn’t part of the mix... I didn’t have to try and be twenty, neither did I feel compelled to take the I-remember-what-it-was-like-to-be-your-age approach. We laughed and talked and listened as ourselves talking to one another. There are things he knows about I want to learn and, I suppose, the reverse is also true. I knew him when he was a kid. It’s much more fun to let him grow up.
I was talking to someone the other day who is about eighty and preparing for surgery. She likes her doctor and she said, “You know how old he is? He’s forty-two,” in a tone that made it sound as if he was going to have to wash the sand from the sandbox off of his hands before he started operating. I wanted to say, “When you were forty-two, you didn’t think of yourself as a kid or as inexperienced. Why not think of him that way as well?” That doctor has probably spent half of his four decades honing his craft. He’s not a novice. She’s missing the chance to see him by keeping him a kid.
I think that’s part of the reason Jesus didn’t hang around Nazareth much. When he went back they kept saying things like, “Isn’t that the carpenter’s kid?” and “Hasn’t he turned into a handsome lad?” and “What are you going to do with your life?” He took his disciples and his miracles and went elsewhere.
from Don't Eat Alone
A couple of students asked me for the links to my Lent series on "Giving it up" - it starts here and runs through six posts. I shan't be blogging Lent in such an intensive way this year (though I'm not actually giving up blogging for Lent!)
Meantime, remember that giving things up for Lent is not supposed to be an individualistic, nor a self-improving process, but a way of actively drawing closer to the reality that we are human and mortal, and that all we are and all we have comes as a gift from God. Here's what I wrote before about that:
It's a common misconception that Lent is about self-improvement. Somehow a half-remembered custom of giving things up has been mixed in with our society's obsession with self-help and self-improvement, so that we've blurred the true meaning of the fast into a rather individualistic concept, more like a New Year Resolution to detox or de-clutter.
Lent is not about giving up luxuries, not about losing weight or gaining other benefits, not about food per se, not about de-cluttering or Feng Shui or about any other kind of feel-good, de-toxifying exercise. In the end, it's about denying yourself some of the essentials of everyday life in order to focus on the reality that we depend upon God for life itself; about re-aligning ourselves with God and his purposes in our world; about reminding ourselves that all we have is a gift from God in any case.
And neither is Lent about achievement. We cannot earn God's love, nor save ourselves. If our Lenten Fast is understood well, it will relieve us of the need to try harder, achieve more, feel worthy. It will ground us in the firm and unshakeable knowledge that we are human - we are but dust, and to dust we shall return - but that to be human is enough, under the loving gaze of God.
I've really been enjoying Milton's blog since I discovered it a while back. He's a chef, writing a whole series for Lent based on his experiences with food and kitchens - kind of Nigel Slater but with a twist of faith.
There are very few fruits and vegetables I can eat (long story) but I do eat potatoes every now and then. So I enjoyed his post today on varieties of potatoes, what makes each variety unique, and what each one is best used for. The Peruvian Blue, he tells us, gains colour because it is planted in beetroot fields. So while each variety has some innate qualities, "the Peruvian is most noticeable because of how it is changed by who it grows alongside of." There's a thought for the day. Go read more of Milton here: don't eat alone: lenten journal: and the kitchen sink.
In the midst of uncertainty and unresolved questions, Jen Lemen recommends Rilke, and the kindness of one lit candle beside a freshly drawn bath. Candlelit baths is a haven I discovered this winter when the light fitting in my bathroom broke and it was a week before I managed to get it fixed. Now the light is fixed but the candles remain. So do the unresolved questions, for which Rilke is indeed a guide for the soul:
I would like to beg you dear Sir, as well as I can, to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don’t search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer. —from the letters of Ranier Maria Rilke
hat tip to my lovely friend Jen
Wonderful lent thoughts about food, and ashes, and living in the present. You have to read this: don't eat alone: lenten reduction.
Among people who give up something for Lent, we nowadays tend to choose something inidividually that means something to us. Originally there was no choice about what you gave up. The things to give up were laid out by the Church, and it was a uniform practice, with slight variations depending on how wealthy you were. Everyone gave up the same thing. Lent was not a test of individual stamina, but a community event. The community aspect was enhanced by the practice of giving to the poor any money saved through the fast.
How can we re-create the community aspect of Lent?
The other evening one of my student groups came over to watch Jésus de Montréal (1989, Denys Arcand). The plot revolves around five actors who perform a Passion play, and over the course of the play's run, their own lives become completely affected by the gospel stories they are playing out. The stark reality of what happens when these not-very-religious people engage with the gospel is contrasted by the way Arcand depicts the Church as insitution, which in every way has insulated itself against the radical effects of the gospel.
One of the scenes depicts one of the five actors going for an audition for an advert, and finding herself on the receiving end of some of the abuses that are not uncommon in that business. The 
actor who plays Jesus watches this scene and then steps in to protect his friend, his reaction being a kind of calculated anger - calm on the surface, but fearless through a passionate reaction against the abuse. He trashes the studio, turning over the tables and tripods, smashing cameras and computers as he goes along.
I wrote about this once before, and it was interesting to see the reaction of my students once tey saw the film for themselves. One of our crowd spoke up when the film was over, voicing what many of us must have thought - that the traditional way to think of Christianity is that you aren't allowed to get angry, feel passionate, care so much about one thing that some other things have to be dealt with in a radical way. The story of Jesus turning over the tables in the Temple can be way too sanitised. Have you ever been told that he was only acting out anger, not really angry? Or that he was angry but completely in control? Or acting to make a point but calm and kind really? I have, and I have long believed that a Jesus who had no passion or anger is a dangerous fiction. I love the Jésus de Montréal adaptation of that story precisely because it delivers an image of the kind of passion and commitment to the cause of righteousness that makes Jesus (or his followers) fearless even against the powers that be.
one of the things I have been thinking about over the last week or so is the connection between Lent and giving up food and our cultural obsession with body-consciousness. Lent is completely subverted if it's taken as an opportunity to lose weight for fashion or image reasons. Lent is supposed to simplify and free you from self-obsession and focus you on GOd. But dieting for fashion consciousness focuses you on yourself, not in a healthy way, but in a way that pressurises you to become something you think someone else thinks you should be.
Last week someone said on the Radio that Size Zero was a very strange concept. What Size Zero says, the commentator pointed out, is that the idea of disappearing altogether is something to celebrate. The disappearance of women, the disallowance of them to take up space in the world, is made to seem virtuous by the label Size Zero. It's a sick idea. And anyone who is using Lent to feed the idea that they should be disappearing is certainly not hearing the liberation of the Christian Gospel, which is supposed to save us holistically, body and soul. Emphatically it does not denigrate the body in favour of the soul, although the way some people interpret the gospel you'd be forgiven for thinking so.
Maybe, if you are a person who has got caught up in the obsession with body size and regular dieting and weight control, the smartest thing you could do for Lent is not give up chocolate or cake or dairy or whatever, but give up dieting.
Someone told me this week of a friend of theirs who, last year, gave up screens for Lent. Screens? Yes - the screens that increasingly dominate our lives - TV, computer, laptop, palm pilot, mobile phone, answerphone, gameboy, playstation, etc etc... THis woman decided that only when work or genuine necessity demanded it would she look at a screen. So she gave up watching TV, all computer-related hobbies and leisure, all non-necessary TXTing and phoning. She rediscovered the pleasure of writing with a pencil, reading books with real pages, and using many reclaimed hours walking in the fresh air and talking face-to-face with real live people.
Lent - it's supposed to be good for the body AND the soul. It's supposed to simplify your life for a while, giving you time and money to re-focus. It's not supposed to feed your vanity by taking off a dress size, but to give you the space to rediscover the true value of life, framed by a fresh vision of God. What part of your consumer lifestyle will you give up, for a while, to get your life into a new gear?
Bart Ehrman, author of 'Misquoting Jesus,' is an agnostic who was formerly a "born again" evangelical believer. The story of how he lost his faith is recorded in the Washington Post. I have a great deal of sympathy with his story. I was once a "born again" believer, and it was in part the recognition of endless intellectual dishonesty, both in biblical interpretation and in church practice, that led me to re-conceive my own faith. For me, though, the end result (so far at any rate) has not been the loss of faith, but a radical reconstruction of it. If, like Ehrman, my faith had depended on the inerrancy of the "original texts" of the Bible, I guess I would have lost my faith too. But the truth is that our faith is not solely based in the Bible, and its inaccuracies and inconsistencies have in any case been known about and lived with for a very long time indeed. Coleridge wrote engagingly in 1824 that reading the Bible as if it were a book, and not a divinely imparted magic text, could only enhance its capacity to connect real human beings with God.
When I lost my naive faith, I had the good fortune of coming to land in a place where the Bible is taken in the context of reason and "tradition" (by which I mean the history and practice of the Church, not "traditionalism"), and consequently the inaccuracies, mistakes, inconsistencies and unknowns of the Biblical record do not necessitate an abandonment of faith.
It intrigues me why people continue working, in a negative way, against a faith they have lost. Where does the energy come from? And what kind of a mission is it to spend your life disproving something? Once you've disproved something, surely there are more interesting projects to move on to?
All the same, I sympathise with people like Ehrman who do lose their faith, because I've walked close to that line myself, and see close-up the crisis that ensues when someone who has carved out their life around a profession that goes hand in hand with a belief system that subsequently crumbles. I'm reminded of the middle-aged Priest in David Hare's Racing Demon, who was faced similarly with the crisis of what to do, as a career priest, when the core of faith seems to vanish.
The article about Ehrman borrows John Updike's description of a loss of faith:
Where does it go, this belief in things not seen? Let's look at "In the Beauty of the Lilies." This is John Updike's novel of the fictional Rev. Clarence Arthur Wilmot, a Presbyterian minister, and his loss of faith. Wilmot, beset by doubt one afternoon in the rectory, "felt the last particles of his faith leave him. The sensation was distinct -- a visceral surrender, a set of dark sparkling bubbles escaping upward . . . there was no God, nor should there be."
I wonder whehter things might have turned out differently for Ehrman had he, like his wife and friend, emerged from a tradition that balanced the Bible with other core elements of faith?
"Why is it called Good Friday?" asked my son. "It's not good at all, it's really bad."
The shops are full of eggs and chickens and sunshine and cheer. But Good Friday and Holy Saturday are the most sombre days in the whole Church calendar, recalling the death and disappearance of God. Not much there to celebrate or feel happy about.
For those who enjoy a degree of certainty in their faith, maybe Good Friday and Holy Saturday don't really "bite" - they are more about anticipation than devastation. But those of us who live with a fragemented faith, a faith that has had too many holes punctured in it, too much damage ever to recover a naive certainty, there is something reassuring about the rise and fall of the Church seasons. It's a relief to be honest, to acknowledge the disappearance of God and the uncertainty of the outcome.
That's not to say that there is no hope of the resurrection. But that hope doesn't forestall the depth of blackness that can descend even upon people of faith. And the recollection that the Easter faith was born in the darkness is, perhaps, a reason to hold on and not to give up.
In my current post, I don't do any Easter services at College. We do Christmas services at Robinson, but the rest of the year our quiet and busy times don't coincide with the rest of the Church - our "big" and stressful seasons come in summer and autumn. Given that exam season is only a few weeks off, I am not complaining about this - Holy Week/Easter serves as the calm before the storm. There's a sense of dislocation about it, all the same - both as a Christian, aware that we go quiet when everyone else is intensely focussed on the central festival of the Church year, and as a member of the clergy, having experienced in two previous posts that the "norm" for the clergy is that this is a madly busy week , so jam packed with services and events and preparations for services that the approach of Easter is more likely to invoke dread than joy. In addition, Holy Week also marks the beginning of the wedding season, which if you are in charge of a "pretty" church means stress season. In my first post (very pretty indeed) we used to have two or three weddings every Saturday from Easter to the end of the summer.
I'm saying prayers for my many clergy friends today - praying that they will find time to breathe in between things, praying that they will feel something of the joy of Easter when it arrives, and praying that the promise of a few days' break next week will sustain them through one of the hardest weeks of their year.
(It occurs to me as I write that "member of the clergy" is not altogether satisfying as a phrase - it's gained currency now that "clergyman" is no longer applicable as a generic term, but "member of" might suggest an exclusivity of its own. "Clergyperson" is awful. Words or phrases like this have to be short and easy to use, not PC-clumsy. But they also need to say what they mean, if at all possible... Hmmmm. Need to ponder for a better word or phrase. )
Today is the day when Jesus turned over the tables in the Temple. Outraged by injustice and commercialisation masquerading as religion, he seems to have found that peaceful demonstration didn't meet the occasion - he just went and trashed the place.
There's a great scene in Jesus of Montreal where the leading character trashes a TV studio where actors are being exploited. He throws hundreds of thousands of pounds worth of cameras and equipment to the ground, in order to make his point. Not exactly a silent, peaceful demonstration - more an act of criminal violence.
I can't easily draw the conclusion that we should go out and commit acts of crminal violence in the name of Jesus. But I do think we should register the level of anger and social unacceptability that was going on here.
Holy week is sometimes guilty of painting Jesus in pastels. "Holy" doesn't mean wet and wimpish. Meek? Mild? As if...
I've had a quiet, introverted Palm Sunday, with time to think a lot about the human tendency to get committed to things and then flake out when the going gets tough; about the human tendency to get over-committed to things and then carry on with them even when all hope is lost; about the human tendency to believe that it's all our fault when things go wrong. All of those tendencies were involved on Palm Sunday - the ones who would flake out a few short days later, the ones who couldn't and wouldn't let go even in the face of danger, and the ones who took more upon themselves than they could cope with without understanding what was going on. They were all there, following the donkey-riding Messiah, waving palms about, and joining in with what felt like a victory but turned out to be a disaster.
There's a very intersting reflection on Palm Sunday here.
Lent is broken up by feast days. This coming Sunday is popularly known as Mothering Sunday, but traditionally was called Refreshment Sunday - the middle Sunday of Lent, which originally was simply a half-way break in the Fast.
When the Industrial Revolution led to people increasingly working and living a significant distance from home and family, Refreshment Sunday was appointed as a day when everyone would return to the Church of their home community to worship. Mothering Sunday was established in the 19th century in order to allow people who were in domestic service to return to their own communities, as they would not be at home for Easter. The Simnel Cake was baked and taken home as a gift for the servant's own mother and family.
When did Mothering Sunday become Mother's Day? Only very recently - in the last 40 years. I have no problem with celebrating mothers - being one myself, I'm entirely receptive to celebrating motherhood any old time! I do remember, though, before I was a Mother, how profoundly excluded one could feel when Church celebrations of Mother's Day tended to give out subliminal messages that one wasn't a "real" woman if you weren't a mother. I think Church should endeavour to celebrate motherhood in a wider sense - focusing on, perhaps, the Community of church, the mothering of God, the support of mothers by the whole church. We also need to take care, in celebrating motherhood, to wave a pastoral antenna for those who long to be mothers but can't, those who have suffered miscarriages and stillbirths, those whose mothers have died recently, or who for any other reason struggle with "Mother's day".
One of my favourite installations in the Wilderness was the Psalm 91 tent. We erected a two-man tent in the Chapel, which you had to walk through a sandy "desert" to reach. Climb inside, and you find the enitre words of Psalm 91 written around the roof and walls of the tent. Nearby, a small tape-player was continuously playing Kathryn's (lovely!) voice reading the Psalm over and over again:
He that dwelleth in the secret place of the Most High
shall abide under the shadow of the Almighty.
I say of the Lord, My refuge and my fortress;
my God, I will confide in him.
Surely he shall deliver thee from the snare of the fowler,
[and] from the destructive pestilence.
He shall cover thee with his feathers,
and under his wings shalt thou find refuge:
his truth is a shield and buckler.
Thou shalt not be afraid for the terror by night,
or the arrow that flieth by day...
Because thou hast made the Lord thy refuge,
the Most High thy dwelling-place,
There shall no evil befall thee,
neither shall any plague come nigh thy tent...
This is one of my all-time best movies. 
And Lent is the perfect time to watch it. It's the story of a group of actors who put on a Passion play, and in the process become mystically involved with the characters they play. It captures brilliantly the power of the Jesus story, showing up the "gods" of secularism, but also packing a powerful critique against the institutional church's tendency to cow-tow to the status quo. Go watch, if you haven't already. Or even if you have.
Today we are putting Wilderness together in the Chapel. 
Wilderness is a series of installations for meditation that give space for thought about who we are, what we're doing here, where God is in all of this, and how we (and God) relate to the big wide world. We can't do a Labyrinth very effectively here due to space restrictions, so I re-shaped the idea into a trail that goes into all the corners of the Chapel, but leaves the main items of furniture in place for services and concerts. You can walk through Wilderness any time in the next week (except when there are services on).
No man knows how bad he is till he has tried very hard to be good. A silly idea is current that good people do not know what temptation means. This is an obvious lie. Only those who try to resist temptation know how strong it is. After all, you find out the strength of the German army by fighting it, not by giving in. A man who gives in to temptation after five minutes simply does not know what it would have been like an hour later.
That is why bad people, in one sense, know very little about badness. They have lived a sheltered life by always giving in. We never find out the strength of the evil impulse inside us until we try to fight it. (C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity, p 13)
This is a guest-blog from Jen Lemen, a writer and friend who lives in the USA
there is no use trying," said alice; "one can't believe impossible things."
"i dare say you haven't had much practice," said the Queen. "when i was your age, i always did it for half an hour a day. why, sometimes i've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast."
--lewis carroll
my friend kelly bean sent me a card the other day, with this printed neatly on the front, the last line highlighted. i have trouble with possible things, let alone impossible things, so it made me laugh to see how often i am in need of a queen of hearts to set my own unruly one in order.
what is it, really? that makes it so hard to sink into ordinary things? to believe that living in the inbetween spaces will not render me invisible, without a voice, without a hope in this crazy world? give me a project, something mindless, something to be conquered with sheer will and enthusiasm, please. but do not ask the impossible things of me. i will disappear into a sea of sadness.
the other day i went about my day distracted, trying to multitask on housewifery types of things, putting off carter at least ten times without even thinking. finally, he brought a book to my makeshift office on the bed, and smiled. "would you like to read this book to me?" he asked, pure goodness billowing in invisible waves from his tiny frame. i looked back into the ocean of those blue eyes, and said, "yes." of course.
he climbs up on the bed. "i know," he says, "i think you can snuggle me." i pull him close. holding the book, my arms make a lazy circle, his body tucked neatly inside. we read, or i read, rather. he listens politely. i have no idea what words i am saying. i can do this on automatic. i can do it without thinking, even after such a nice request. but i have the feeling all that is just fine. we finish and he sighs.
"now do you feel better?" he asks, cheerful, sweet. i am with him now completely in this question. it is so familiar to me, this way carter has, though so quickly i forget. "yes, buddy. i do."
after carter was born, i was so disraught, the circumstances of his birth so painful to me, that i had a very hard time taking care of him. i could go through the motions, but my heart was so far away, floating on some faraway shore. i could forget about him completely, but he never forgot about me. months later, working through those dark feelings, i had the stark realization that while i struggled to love carter in that connected whole way, he had long ago taken me straight to his heart. i was under his skin, and he was content to wait longer than any child should wait for me to rescue my shipwrecked heart.
it was the most impossible thing ever, that someone so small, so precious, would leave his heart that long exposed in the elements, while i floundered, lost at sea. i could hardly believe it. my tears, at this new understanding, poured over my soul like tiny streams of sorrow and hope.
now years later, carter is still this way. the long looks of infancy are passed, direct invitations taking their place. he still smiles at me first. he sees himself a great find, and believes with his whole heart if i uncover such precious forgotten treasure, that my heart will race with joy. and he is right.
i wish to reverse this flow of love. i wish to be the one to offer first, the one to smile, the one to care. i worry about carter and this long patience. i wish to believe the most impossible thing of all, that i can weather a storm of disappointment and not lose sight of shore. or better yet, that i can row through dark glassy seas with my heart at the helm. he started out ahead of me, and now it seems i can't catch up. i want to overtake him with surprise and joy.
carter slides off the bed, calm and contented. i sit holding the book in my hands, remembering his breath rising and falling as he sat beside me. i am floating now, the kindness of the cord of love that connects us anchoring me to all that is good and real.
the queen of hearts stands beside, laughing at me and all this talk of not trying. all i can do is agree. is it so impossible, she says, to believe that you are not drowning at all, that this sea is an ocean of love, waiting to envelope you in all the ordinary things that will set your heart free?
Jen Lemen
If the lost word is lost, if the spent word is spent
If the unheard, unspoken
Word is unspoken, unheard;
Still is the unspoken word, the Word unheard,
The Word without a word, the Word within
The world and for the world;
And the light shone in darkness and
Against the Word the unstilled world still whirled
About the centre of the silent Word.
O my people, what have I done unto thee.
Where shall the word be found, where will the word
Resound? Not here, there is not enough silence
Not on the sea or on the islands, not
On the mainland, in the desert or the rain land,
For those who walk in darkness
Both in the day time and in the night time
The right time and the right place are not here
No place of grace for those who avoid the face
No time to rejoice for those who walk among noise and deny the voice...
T.S. Eliot, Ash Wednesday
It's a common misconception that Lent is about self-improvement. Somehow a half-remembered custom of giving things up has been mixed in with our society's obsession with self-help and self-improvement, so that we've blurred the true meaning of the fast into a rather individualistic concept, more like a New Year Resolution to detox or de-clutter.
Lent is not about giving up luxuries, not about losing weight or gaining other benefits, not about food per se, not about de-cluttering or Feng Shui or about ay other kind of feel-good, de-toxifying exercise. In the end, it's about denying yourself some of the essentials of everday life in order to focus on the reality that we depend upon God for life itself; about re-aligning ourselves with God and his purposes in our world; about reminding ourselves that all we have is a gift from God in any case.
And neither is Lent about achievement. We cannot earn God's love, nor save ourselves. If our Lenten Fast is understood well, it will relieve us of the need to try harder, achieve more, feel worthy. It will ground us in the firm and unshakeable knowledge that we are human - we are but dust, and to dust we shall return - but that to be human is enough, under the loving gaze of God.
Tomorrow Jen Lemen will appear here as guest-blogger with her lovely post about the Queen of Hearts - encapsulating in her inimitable way the truth that trying harder is not what this spiritual journey is all about.
Over the last few days, several dozen people have asked me why we give things up for Lent.
Some people find the idea objectionable - but among the various objections I’ve heard, I would have to agree with most of them, on the basis that they have grown up as rather recent habits of folklore that have nothing much to do with Christian doctrine. "Isn’t it all a bit negative?", said one person, "It seems to imply that God and religion is all a bit of a killjoy exercise. Why should God care or be impressed if I give up chocolate or alcohol?"
AKMA had this wonderful de Lubac quote sent to him as a Valentine a couple of years back. I'm in a mid-term crisis at work and seriously haven't got time to do that 16-year-old angst thing about worrying whether anything will fall on the doormat (and even if it does, it will inevitably be three days late and delivered next door, given the lamentable state of the Royal Mail) But thinking on a higher plane, this is a marvellous piece about affection and tenderness.
One need not blush or excuse oneself for being
tender: it is an honor for which one must be proud, it is a grace that
one must spread, for where there is no tenderness, neither is there joy
given nor joy received. I know of course that one can misuse one's
heart, one can wither one's body and soul in debilitating and sterile
tenderness. It is the path that is opened wide to those entering into
life. . . It is the same with human tenderness as with all
beautiful things: it must gain mastery over itself and free itself from
its masks, just like the morning sun, leaving the mists of dawn. . . . But
one would be wrong to laugh at this word and this thing called
affection. Do you think that the hearts of the great apostles did not
overflow with this tenderness? Look again at the epistles of Saint Paul
or at that wonderful passage from Acts that recounts the farewell of
the saint to his faithful at Ephesus: tears stream on all sides from
these eyes that will never see each other again here below. Meditate
especially on the profound tones, the ardent rhythm of Paul, writing to
his faithful, whom he has engendered in Christ and who are his
children. . . . Affection has its dangers, but the way to
guard against them is not to hound it: one must educate it. Rather than
destroy the sympathies, one must strive to universalize them. . . If
there is no love without tenderness, there is no tenderness without
strength and purity. Wine that is watered down loses its quality, its
vigor and its aroma, but wine that is cloudy is not longer wine. Water
is better.
----Henri de Lubac
I made a bad decision there. Couldn't think of anything significant to give up for Lent. So at the last minute I just took the standard option - desserts and chocolate. Two days in and I'm already three pounds lighter, and I don't have too much spare weight to lose. It's 2.30 on Friday and I can literally feel myself losing weight. I need those calories. I may need to do some kind of a transfer deal with the Lord, or I will have disappeared by Easter.
Theologically speaking I'm one of the awkward squad,
always asking questions
or questioning answers;
it's uncomfortable for all concerned,
especially me.
I wish it wasn't so;
wish I could tuck myself up in tradition,
snuggle down in certainty,
learn to trust,
but I don't know how -
don't even know what the God-word means to me now.
I do know love when I meet it though.
Oh yes, I recognise Love.
Frances Copsey
Why can't I believe it's not a year since I was burning the Ashes for Ash Wednesday? - perhaps because it isn't a whole year, but only 50 weeks. There's something weird and wonderful about a moveable feast: an early or late Easter can place the beginning of Lent in the back end of winter or the beginning of Spring (at least, if you're in the Northern Hemisphere) and, in this particular geographical location two or three weeks either way makes a significant difference to how the world feels.
Celebrate the anticipation of Lent by sending someone an e-card for Lent - John Davies alterted me to these rather wonderful things from Wild Goose. I think I might pop half a dozen in the e-mail right now.
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