The Eve of Holy Week

Once again - the anticipation of the journey into and through Holy Week.
It is quiet and slightly hushed in my home tonight. Inside it is in its usual
state of clutter. Outside the landscapers have completed the annual spring
clean-up.

Funny how it speaks to my personal sense of order and disorder. I appear
to be cleaned up and ready for life on the outside - just like the yard, but
inside my feelings and senses are in a slightly disordered state. I await the
journey of Holy Week, its daily countdown to remembrance of the
crucifixion and the dark time that follows until the Vigil and that journey
from darkness to light and the ecstasy of the pure light of Easter Morning.

Every year I watch and contemplate my own steps and the liturgical steps
that lead and challenge me. I want and need to enter the mystery and seek
some newer understanding of it all. I want and need to do this and I want and
need to open myself to new possibilities. The role of seeker seems easy
initially, but the work must be steady and focused. In my congregation
opportunities to serve, sing, read and just be present encroach on the
quietude of the week. But these are the tools that open me to a deeper
sense of it all.

I have chosen to take the book called "The Last Week" by Marcus Borg
and John Dominic Crossan with me. It will be my daily fellow journeyer
as I walk and remember.

Being a person of faith is work. And it offers one so much more if one
is attentive and open.  My prayer is to watch and in watching renew
my inner self in a different way - still honest to my own short-comings,
but ready to really journey.



R

Redemption - from the cinema

Strange - how sometimes as we click from one station to another,
we inadvertently select the most extraordinary film moment of a
beloved piece. Of course, I happened to do that very thing tonight.
Between the murder, mayhem and news of the day I came upon
the moment in the "Shawshank Redemption" that always puts me
over the moon. Could it have actually happened the way it was
presented? Most likely not. But it for me is the pivotal moment in
the entire film - everything is slightly different after this scene and
how wonder-filled my opportunity to click on just that incredible scene.

It is when the Tim Robbins character locks himself in the warden's office
and broadcasts over the prison public address system Mozart's sublime duet
between the Countess and Susanna in " Le Nozze di Figaro." It always
gives me particular pause when it is performed. But in this film the
entire prison population stops, listens, and time seems suspended by
this unexpected interruption of their daily life. The beauty of art transforms
the moment and unexpectedly brings hope and transcendence to those
under incarceration. It is timeless and more beautiful than anything nature
can evoke in us.

Morgan Freeman's character says he did not what what those two ladies
were singing about but the day was suddenly different and redemptive.
Art has such power when it is inserted into our lives and we stop and let
it flow freely into our souls.

In our current political unrest, we need to hope for and experience this kind
of interruption from Art. This kind of "break" is what will transform and
inform our lives and allow us to rebirth ourselves - if only for a much
needed moment.


R

"Doing" Lent...

Are you like me this far into Lent? Remember all the things you thought
you wanted to take on or "do" this Lent? Here I find myself well into this Lent
and all the things I had hoped to take on or "do" have been left to the side
of every day existence and the busyness we create in our daily lives.

I ask myself - why have I done this again? Is this a Lenten block I have
over zealously created? Do I, or maybe the question is, can/could/would I
"do" Lent in a way I think personal discipline and faith call me to do?
Or am I just unable or perhaps more truthfully, not willing to take it
full on. Oh, the reading I planned to do, the meditation time I wanted to
set aside, even a little prayer time I wanted to create and explore.

So here I am in mid-Lent just bumbling along and full of questions and
far removed from my planned disciplines, again. Perhaps I have an
unacknowledged fear of what I might find or even more to the point,
what I most likely would not find. I know I am not alone in this. And perhaps
I am more willing to admit this than others. That might be a piece of the
truth I am seeking. I don't feel guilty, I don't feel any sense of a failure;
I just feel unable to commit to a discipline that might engender new
awakenings and deeper commitments. Maybe.

I shall persevere. I look forward to all of Holy Week and the Great Vigil of
Easter and then the ice cream of Easter Morning. But the forty days
keep eluding me.

The big maybe is that perhaps next year.......maybe.


R