Snatching at Lent

Snatching at Lent February 9, 2016

I become positively twitchy when I have more than one extraordinary activity in a week. The desperately adhered to order of each day is probably the primary way I manage to keep God in his place–close but not too close. So when anything arises to disrupt my plans, like, say, a child’s birthday, I flail and rage. Not usually externally, well, not too much, but internally there is a veritable storm of unpleasantness.

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Today is the child’s birthday. She’s going to be five. Well, that’s wrong, she is five now. She is as tall as her older sister, and louder, more demanding, more sure of everything. She likes me without reservation, whereas her two older sisters are always pausing to consider how they feel about me. I can tell by the set expression in their eyes.
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And the evening is the usual celebration of Shrove Tuesday, which means pancakes and children dressed up and having their faces painted, and then everyone processing round the church to the back to stand safely just inside the door while Matt crouches outside over a fire pot of burning palms. The sugar of the pancakes, the ash floating up into the night air, the raucous home made music for marching around the church will mingle together and fix indelibly forever in the minds of so many children, and maybe even some grown ups.
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The church year has to be lived out with the senses. The indulgence of butter and sugar and balloons, brightly lit in the darkness is rightly over-laid against the sobriety and sorrow of communion in the early morning darkness–the prayers, the quiet, the ash, the facing of the self towards the death that is deserved.
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I used to always weep, too tired to think straight, when I would carry up an infant to be marked on the forehead with ash. Even the child will die. Even I. We are both bound for the grave, the one like the other. The fatigue and the grief would flow mingled down and then I would creep home to sleep it off.
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Lent is the best time in the year, especially for someone like me, for whom temptation is always crouching at my door, ready to devour. I love God not really by my own choosing, but because he is always breaking down the pile of clutter that I heap up to hinder hm. I love him because he first loved me. I go on loving him because he goes on loving me. The sign in ash of the cross, of death, is the only way of life. What better mark for a little girl on her birthday, to be marked out in her mortality for eternity itself.
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How strange that the first Sunday in Lent should also be Valentine’s Day. The world is bedecked with red and pink, with chocolates and teddy bears. But inside the church the flowers are gone and the altar is a smear of purple. It is the truest celebration of love, where one died and the other lived, where one suffered the worst single moment of unrequited love. Love isn’t chocolates and flowers. Love is the foundation of the cosmos. Without it, we wouldn’t have a breath or a thought. The Love of God, poured out for the world, drop by drop, word by word, moment by moment, crumb by crumb, will not fail. Royal Purple, then, together with red, for me, clinging to each temptation as it wanders by, trying to let go to grab on to the Bridegroom instead. But even if I don’t manage it, even if I am faithless and fickle, like all the best stories, the Guy, the Son of Righteousness, always gets the girl in the end.

 


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