My goodness we would like to see the sun. I know that on Wednesday it will be two weeks. It may be that already, but as of then I will be sure. It is warm (well by our definition anyway) and the snow is fading amazingly quickly, but it's just so unrelentingly (yes, indeed) gray! Despite this, we are courting Spring and had a nice weekend. We will grill every chance we get these days...of late on the little charcoal-er that we bought because it takes the gas grill way too long to heat up in the winter. And I have to admit, there is something about the taste of that charcoal! Last night it was steak, with some wonderful early asparagus. Spring, indeed.
And Lent, in all it's moderate gray Lentedness poddles on as well. Yes, I know, I have euphoric recall about that one wonderful, show-stopping Lent....the one where the Spiritual disciplines and my readiness to be "Lenty" somehow all came together in the perfect holy storm and it just was....right and good, and nothing will ever be its equal. All it needed to be in the way of preparation and readiness...never known before and alas I am coming to believe, never to be again. Yes, I know....all things are their own things and in their own time. You can't go back and recreate something because you are never the exact same being in the exact same frame of mind or spirit again. And my saner rational self also has a guess that it really probably wasn't quite as wonderfully spiritually uplifting as in memory, because things just never are, are they? This one, containing very reality of of life and death and the whole point of all in before us in the life again brings me to a bit of somewhere that I think is probably very authentically Lenten...the problem is I am just not able to articulate as well as I'd like just exactly where it is it does bring me!
I teared up in church on Sunday as I consecrated. I haven't done that in a very long while, nor have I had that sense of the Communion of Saints around, beyond, and amidst me in quite some time as I did on Sunday....that sense that stops time and tends to make me lose my place in the proceedings. Bad enough in the familiar words of Rite II....it could be fatal as I falter my way through the thees and thous and hasts of the Rite I we adopt for Lenten Sundays. But there it was (they were?) none the less, and there was not a blessed thing I could do about it--nor wanted to!
St. Patrick will be celebrated in fine style by us on Wednesday night. We are having a Celtic Eucharist....singing some beautiful music and using a lovely setting of the liturgy to take us back and away and quiet us down a bit. There will be a drum too if mine comes in the air in time. Me in an alb with a drum....yeah, I can't help thinking about some of the good sisters of my childhood. "What has become of that girl?" For some I'm sure it's tantamount to no good end. But you know, I think that my lovely Irish Catholic mother will be having a great giggle over all of it.
So there we are. Monday winds down. It's off to yoga now....a spiritual thing in my day (thinking still about that Friday Five) that was far too full of things that were maybe religious and maybe simply things. But in this there will be quiet, and I will pipe down and find a space for God to settle in me for a time and we will dance a bit as we play with Spirit and breath and asana in the space created there.
3 comments:
I hope for you that the intentional time and words of consecration will start to re-connect you again.
Since I started leading worship some Sundays, it seems it is very difficult to get past the feeling that I might lose my place or fumble completely...it is only now, three plus years later, that I find moments when I transcend and am able to authentically by there in Spirit. Rather I feel like when I lead I am not worshiping for myself, but as an intermediary for others most of the time.
I don't know if those amazing spiritual moments are so because they catch us by surprise and then we begin to anticipate more - which then because of our anticipation they never happen again quite the same way? Or maybe we only get a few of them in our lifetimes? But I do know that transcendent moment in the middle of the Eucharistic prayer, regardless of the prayer used...it is a spirit thing.
anyway...hope the spring continues to unfold in ways that stimulate your senses.
It is an interesting place to be when the current Lent doesn't live up to a past Lent - I guess if each season was predictable, there would not be quite the same sense of anticipation and wonder about how a season would unfold - the mystery would lessen
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