yesterday, i so much wanted to attend ash wednesday services. it is one of my favorite days of the church year. why? well, the touch is important. very few days are we ritually blessed with holy touch. and this is a touch connected to words that speak the very deepest truth about me: that i am a creature. remember, o man, that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.
but when i got home the sonja was off to support a friend at an art opening, dinner needed to be got on, and homework finished, and the kids were tired, and most services we could find were beginning at 7 or 7:30. i reluctantly gave into sitting with isaiah to finish his math problems and then doing the bedtime rituals of teeth cleaning, story reading, prayer saying, and song singing. then i hoped i might find an 8 o'clock service to run off to. but no such luck. sonja and i talked about her frustrations at work and about the day, and we shared a cup of tea. then, early to bed to escape the chill of the house. i told her i didn't know what to do for lent but i thought i would stop eating sweets. i'm not usually one to 'give something up' but i'd already taken on the disciple of praying through a book on waiting (vanstone's the stature of waiting). i was sad not to have made services, but somehow the events of the evening made the same point to me. i am a creature. and the bending towards the needs of children and spouse are in someway an emptying of my vanity that i'm especially spiritual, or devotional, because the service or the ashes are more important to me. no, the call is to face my creatureliness and to be present to the call of god in my daily life.
here is maggie dawn, a new person in my blog world, writing about what lent is for . . . and its just right on.
"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."
anon, and +peace
very interesting
Posted by: Asha Nair | March 03, 2006 at 04:40 AM