Suspended Memory

Today is Fat Tuesday, the day of Mardi Gras and celebration before Lent.

Knowing we will be fasting for 40 days in Lent, we feast today.  Sounds a bit foolish doesn't it?

If you have been foolish, exalting yourself, or if you have been devising evil, put your hand on your mouth.  For as pressing milk produces curds, and pressing the nose produces blood, so pressing anger produces strife. - Proverbs 30:32-33

I chose these verses from Proverbs in this morning's readings because they remind me to take control of myself.

I think that is a good thing to think about as I enter into the most solemn time of the year for Christians.  For the next forty days, we will be focusing on death.

Tomorrow we will be reminded that we are but dust, and our readings each week will take us from the beginning of Jesus's ministry through to the last days of his earthly life.

We begin with his baptism and end with his brutal persecution and death on the cross on Good Friday.

We encounter these readings, though, protected from the full experience.  We know the outcome on Easter Sunday, so we may not be totally engaged in the pain and disappointment felt by his disciples.

But what if we could suspend our memory and just experience the story as it unfolds, not knowing the ending?  What would these forty days be like?

Would we feel the anger rising up in us?  Would we want revenge and justice, or would we run away in fear for our own lives as his followers?

Proverbs tells us to refrain from pushing the anger too far, to keep our mouths shut when we are consumed with it.  It reminds us that reacting this way is the path to evil, a path we should not take.

Maybe when confronted with pain and frustration we should experience it fully and not run quickly to act.

That is counterintuitive, it goes against our grain.  We want fairness and justice and we want it now, not at some indefinite time in the future, or in some afterlife.

The test of Lent is to suspend everything, to hold ourselves in check, to wait, to be patient, to come to know that we are nothing and yet we are fully and totally lived.

This world is not built on fairness and justice.  It is far from perfect.  It calls us to be a part of it, and is comprised of the same stuff as our mortal beings.  We are its grains of sand.

So, we tend to act like it.  Lent is a reminder that there is more to us than dust.  Because of our Lord and Savior, we are children of God, born into the kingdom through the waters of baptism, and raised with him in the resurrection.

That is the Good News.  But before we can feel the joy of that knowledge, we go into the desert with Jesus and pray.  We come to grips with our mortality and accept its limitations.  We stop exalting ourselves and become humble.

That's the challenge of Lent, the focus of our journey together and I pray we take comfort in knowing we are not alone.  We have each other and the assurance that where two or more are gathered in His name, He is with us.

More to come...