We approach Lent in the church, leading to Holy Week, the week of the passion of the Christ. The last vestiges of our revelry are swept up from our indifferent streets by the underpaid working overtime. Revelry has its costs. And then in sober solemnity we acknowledge what we’ve known all along, that we are but ashes and dust. Living a sacramental life, which is what we aim to do in the Episcopal Church, is the means by which we name what is true about us humans, the rigor of our lives, our hopes, our aspirations, our place in the grand, ambiguous scheme of things. Liturgy is an outward and visible way by which we pay attention to our innate mythology: what is true about ourselves, and what is true about God; and the mysterious relationship between the two.
Dante Allighieri, the great Italian poet, got it right in The Divine Comedy, way ahead of its time; long before the twentieth century discovery of the unconscious mind; long before modern psychology. Dante proposed that the trajectory of human life is a cyclical journey through hell, purgatory, and heaven, ascribing meaning to the mysterious tension and progression in human life between suffering and ecstasy; that the way up is the way down; that transformation and maturity is borne through suffering; that, as the Steve Miller band sings, “you gotta go through hell to get to heaven.”
So our Lenten journey as the church gathered, is a dramatic depiction of what we believe to be true; that the way up is the way down. Beginning with Ash Wednesday we start our descent into our very mortality, and into the reality that there are forces that stand against the love of God in our world, and against our neighbor; forces that would reduce to ash and dust the created order entire. We, as the church, are witnesses to the truth. We must name it lest it be forgotten. It is our duty to be an outward and visible sign of what we proclaim and hope to be beautiful and true.
All of this to encourage you to keep a Holy Lent. It is a time in which we pay close attention to the way of things… being prayerful, in short. Your participation will nourish your soul, and it will nourish the life of the church; and it will perhaps nourish others beyond our knowing. The Truth will set us free from our anxious illusions that we have shored up against the fearful dark. But to be sure, the dark comes first if we wish to aspire to the light. There is no Easter without Good Friday. So brothers and sisters I bid you pay close attention this Lent, be intentional in this holy walk, and know all the while that the passionate dark is not the last word.
