A Lenten Lapse, or This Is It!

                                                                                ©MAAB

I adore looking at images like this and letting myself veer off into spells of daydreaming -  the desert's 'there-ness', its purity, quiet depth and that special stillness . . . Ah me! What can I say, I have a lively romantic streak: I am easily, indeed quite regularly, seduced by beauty.

There are, however, experiences of the desert that have nothing to do with the physical locale and as I have been reflecting on the past few weeks I have been carrying with me the marvellously droll Yiddish proverb: Der Mentsch trakht, un Got lakht, Man plans, God laughs. The desert one enters with such mindfulness, sobriety and care in late winter has, I think, one thing to teach: surrender.  However one encounters it, the desert aims to bring one into the space of being that knows, whatever the circumstances, that one is in God's time and place. 

One may enter Lent with a mind to reorient the self; to open up the channels and see what's what and who's who in the zoo? Spring is coming in the northern hemisphere and all is quickening; it makes sense to have kept vigil before the coming of the light. Yes, it makes sense and we do what we can to position ourselves to catch the halos but it depends entirely on grace as to what comes, with whom and how and when.

'Ordinary' time Lent is not, in church parlance. Nevertheless, this present cannot be avoided. Time is time: this present, a gift. A gift just as it is, not as we wish it to be.

This morning I read only the first sentence of Stanley Hauerwas' tribute to Rowan Williams and it was affirmation and comfort enough: The hardest thing in the world is to be where we are. Why? Because life is complex and we have to live with that. The desert experience, during Lent or any other season of life in fact, entails a solitude which forces people to confront their fear and evasiveness and so equips them for involvement by a stripping-down of the will.

There again is that shedding I wrote about a few posts ago.

I am reminded of Anne Morrow Lindbergh's resonant observation in Gift from the Sea that,

The sea does not reward those who are too anxious, too greedy, or too impatient. To dig for treasures shows not only impatience and greed, but lack of faith. Patience, patience, patience, is what the sea teaches. Patience and faith. One should lie empty, open, choiceless as a beach - waiting for a gift from the sea.

I have always loved the wave-like rhythms of the 'patience, patience, patience' and for all that the waves spoke and speak. It suggests to me a gentler kind of renewal than the rather more bracing 'stripping down of the will' that Williams characterizes. The end result is the same. We need, Williams says, to participate patiently in the conversation necessary for the discovery that we swim in the sea of God's love.

[Are you wondering how I moved from the desert to the sea so casually? Do you not see the waves hidden in the dune pictured above? :D]

There is so much in Williams' work that I am so grateful for, so much that I treasure. Today, I will close with this pearl:

[One] must also learn to live in and attend to the reality of the Church (or, Life, if you prefer--Kate) as it is, to do the prosaic things that can be and must be done now and to work at my relations now with the people who will not listen to me or those like me--because what God asks of me is not to live in the future but to live with honesty and attentiveness in the present, i.e., to be at home. We constantly try to start from somewhere other than were we are. Truthful living involves being at home with ourselves, not complacently but patiently, recognizing that what we are today, at this moment, is sufficiently loved and valued by God to be the material with which he will work, and that the longed-for transformation will not come by refusing the love and the value that is simply there in the present moment. Living in the truth involves the same sober attention to what is there - to the body, the chair, the floor, the voice we hear, the face we see--with all the unsatisfactoriness that this brings. Yet this is what it means to live in the kingdom where Jesus rules, the kingdom that has no frontiers to be defended.