Passiontide

Perhaps all of the Castles mirror the Spiral Castle. To some degree, every castle is the light the Spiral Castle reflected to the different corners of the compass. I am finding the The Golden Castle and the Spiral Castle nearly inseparable. Here, light and dark are together. The beauty of bright sky and warm days is upon us, but for many of us, for me, the toll of changing seasons includes bodily sickness. Some people I know are struck by depression coming out of winter. We are in the glory of days when we no longer need the furnace and can open the windows, when we can walk outside not burdened by a surfeit of clothes and the sun remains in the sky. Yet my body aches with a springtime sickness.

Central to this is the glorious mystery of Passiontide, the last two weeks of Lent, beginning with Passion Sunday. I had always thought Passion Sunday and Palm Sunday were the same, but it turns out that Passion Sunday was abolished by the Catholic Church in the 1960’s and most churches no longer have it. By the magic and miracle which I have come to understand is part of life, I heard someone give a Passion Sunday service though, reconfirming my desire to celebrate Passiontide.

Why Passiontide was stopped may mirror why I left the Church, all churches. I imagine the powers that be decided that people could not sustain the mystery of sorrow for two whole weeks, so now the Passion and the story of Palm Sunday are rolled into one day and silenced from Sunday until Holy Thursday. All the marvelous power of that initiatory story of the suffering of Christ is compacted to as short a time as possible so that people can glance at it and move on.

Several years out of the Church, Passiontide comes to me, and so does the sermon the Coptic bishop on the radio gave: “Now we leave behind the active God and enter into the God who comes into this world and is done to, suffers.” To get my writerly mind right, I need to type something down, but the greatest frustration for me is not acting, not thinking out the thing, simply stumbling through what is happening to me and inching along as best as I can, simply taking the sufferings and joys of life as they come, deaing with my physical weakness. The witch longs to be active, but another part of the Craft is the passive initiation, the reception of what God has for us, the power bestowed in waiting in the center which is eloquently represented by Christ on the Cross. And so, here I am, waiting.