This is apparently the first time I've been back to this page sense Ash Wednesday and I leanr much to my sheer idocy, that I clearly forgot to write anything for the first Sunday of Lent called Invocabit, or Quadregesima. There is no point in trying to go back and remember what I forgot. We jsut need to think about a few things. I look so forward to Lent and then I'm in it and it's like: so what? The first readying is of the templtaito in the desert, which we celebrate befor on a Sunday of the Epipjany and this Sunday we celebrate hte Trsnfiguration as we did a few Sundays ago,. But between the Sundays what is the week, and even on the Sunday's exactly what are we doing? We're fasting, true enough, and were wearign drabber clothes and no jewelry, but what are we doing? We're on the road to Jerusalem, true enough. But what is that? what does that mean?
I actually think that in the same way Holy Thursday is a celebration of the next two days ahead, that the weeks of Lent ate an unfolding celebration of Holy Week. This sounds extraordinary, but one msut thing that Holy Week is happening all the time. It is a mistake to say Jesus suffered mroe than anyone else when he went to the Cross. His trial was for a night and a day, excruciating but many of his saints went through much more. The suffering is not contest and confining Jesus's srory to a week or a night and a day actually misses the point.The suffering of Christ is the suffering of the whole world. The Passion of the Christ is the passion of the whole world. Holy Week is every day we live the life of Jesus and offer what we do to the way of the Cross.
At the beginning of the Gospels, Jesus is asked why he and his disciples do not fast. In the Gospel of Luke it is placed right after Jesus has gone to the house of Levi the Publican. He replies:
“Can you make the guests of the bridegroom fast while He is with them? But the time will come when the bridegroom will be taken from them; then they will fast.”
Luke 5.34, 35
The fasting of Jesus is different from the fasting of John or even from the fasting of Judaism. He says the time of celebration is here, but in Lent our fasting and the discplines we choose to exercise tell a truth that we stay away from much of the year: in some form the Bridegroom is NOT here. In some way the Kingdom of God is NOT present. Our fasting is not only prayer and penitence, but the admission of a loss. In many ways our lives in Lent are no different from our lives in Christmas and Easter. There we are meant to look deeper into things, explore the joy of life, come into the gratitude and thanksgiving of seein the presence of God even when such a presence seems to be undetectable. There is something restful in the fast of Lent, something that says, no, he is not here. You cannot seek him here. No, this is not the Kingdom. No, the Bridegroom has departed.. Yes, we await his arrival.
I am tmepted to say this week has been rough. I am not sure it has been rougher than any other week. Here there is no ndeed to detil the bleak half despairs and utter weariensse I felt by Wednesday or go on about the large amount of work on Monday or the doubt on Sunday that I would ever have formal work again. The weeks take a toll and as they come to an end you hope that next week will be different, that the rest you seek at the week's end will carry into the next set of days,
And it is in this Lenten country that we continue. It's here, where we forget to do th things we longed to do and remember what we would like to forget, and are still aggravated by the little griefs that we let God bless this time of living without and sanctify all the many things we have to live with that we wish we did not
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