MORE snow???

It started up again out there! I've never seen this kind of winter here, and it's taking some getting used to. Six to eight inches in the forecast for today - they underestimated last time.

My husband is saying that he "can't wuss out two Sundays in a row!" because "nobody will believe" him -- stuck in your own driveway? Two Sundays in a row? Yeah, right. We don't live in a climate like that, and everyone knows it.

Natural state

Silly is you in a natural state,
and serious is something you have to do until you can get silly again.

Mike Myers

What is Lent?

For some unknowable reason, this year as Lent approaches all kinds of pensive, thoughtful, and almost yearning thoughts and emotions have been swirling in my -- hm. --well, they're in my chest, actually. I may or may not write about it here as Lent goes on, but I thought I'd post an answer to What Is Lent? At least, if you read this little blog, and if this part of it is interesting at all for you, you'll know what I mean by this (mostly an) oddity. This is not something I do on my own - this season is kept as a member of a specific community. In our part of Christendom, here is the answer to,

What is Lent?

Lent begins for us on Ash Wednesday, with the Penitential Office and the Imposition of Ashes, in the ancient tradition of mourning and repentance. Ash Wednesday is the first day of the forty days of Lent, the season preceding the highest feast day of the Christian Year, the Feast of the Resurrection, which we commonly call Easter. On Ash Wednesday, the priest makes the sign of the cross on our foreheads, and says the ancient words,

Remember, o man, that dust thou art,

And to dust thou shalt return.

And now for Lent itself.

How many days are there in the season of Lent?
There are forty days in the season of Lent.

Why do we observe Lent for forty days?
In remembrance and imitation of Our Lord’s being tempted by Satan in the wilderness for forty days, we keep the Lenten fast for forty days, so that we too might put Satan behind us.

What days of the week are included in the forty days?
All days except Sunday are included during the forty days of Lent, which is always a Christian feast day because it is an echo of the one Easter Sunday.

How many days are in Eastertide?
There are forty days in the season of Eastertide, and every Sunday is included in those forty days.

During the season of Lent, what do Christians do?
During Lent, it is common and traditional Christian practice to:

...abstain from the eating of flesh meat, in honor of Our Lord’s sacrifice of his own flesh for us, on all Fridays (as throughout the year) and Wednesdays (as echoes of the first Wednesday in Lent, Ash Wednesday). Ash Wednesday and Good Friday are the two most strict fast and abstinence days of the Christian year.

...abstain from luxuries of meat and drink, such as desserts, wine and other alcoholic drink, and from frivolous luxuries of life such as attendance at movies or restaurants, or the sort of television viewing or reading which may be too distracting from the Lenten quiet.

...fast on all the days of Lent. (Sundays are never fast days, and are not included in the forty days.) Ordinary Lenten fasting is the eating of one ordinary meal, and two smaller meals that would together make the portions of one meal. If age or health make the Lenten fast too difficult, you must not injure yourself by following it too strictly. Similarly, if your work requires more food than a fasting diet would provide, you must eat enough to do your work well, and not defraud your neighbor by reason of your fast.

...take on some additional acts of discipline and devotion. Commonly, this would include such things as extra attendance at Mass, daily examinations of conscience and the making of a good confession either weekly or at the end of Lent (Holy Saturday is a common day for making an Easter confession), faithfully saying the Morning Prayer and/or Evening Prayer office from the Book of Common Prayer or using some other daily devotional aid to prayer, and the reading of spiritually helpful books. Some collect the money saved from luxury spending and use it instead for charitable giving such as parish or missions work, meeting the needs of those less fortunate, or some other special project.

...“fight manfully” against some particular weakness of character during the forty days by exercising its opposite virtue. One might practice looking especially for kind things to say to fight a habit of criticism, or look for ways to serve other people in order to combat a habit of selfishness, or rise in the morning half an hour before necessary to combat the spirit of sloth. During Lent, we look for ways to replace a vice with its corresponding virtue.

In order to decide one’s best course for Lent each year, it is wise and advisable to consult with a clergyman or spiritual adviser as to one’s own Lenten Rule. Lent is not a time for self-punishment or meaningless deprivations, but is instead a time of increased self-discipline for the purpose of mastery. During Lent, we learn afresh to master our physical lives and bodies so that we may come more fully to present our souls and bodies to our heavenly Father to be a reasonable, holy, and living sacrifice .

Collect

The Collect shall be said every day in Lent, after the Collect appointed for the day, beginning on Ash Wednesday until Palm Sunday.

Almighty and everlasting God, who hatest nothing that thou hast made, and dost forgive the sins of those who are penitent; Create and make in us new and contrite hearts, that we, worthily lamenting our sins and acknowledging our wretchedness, may obtain of thee, the God of all mercy, perfect remission and forgiveness, through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

The View

As I mention from time to time, the "journey" of this life is the image in my head of how we interact with each other as humans, how we progress in experience, how we eventually get to God ... it all feels like a journey to me.

This image fell into my brain - came into view - like watching something through the mist and the mist clears as you watch - while we were on vacation a few years ago. It seemed like revelation at the time, but, of course, everyone knows this feeling. All the philosophers, the authors of the books of Holy Writ, the pundits, and the grandmothers -- everyone knows life is a journey. What I got wasn't revelation. It was clarity. Clarity, and a panoramic visually stunning impression of it. When I look around like this, the sounds of one of the most clear tunes I know are what I hear.



When I first saw it, it seemed to me that suddenly I was at the edge of a vast plain, and all of the human race, in times past and here today, spread out across the face of the land, and stretching further back than the horizon to my left, in history and thinning out to be only a few people to my right, where a few men are closer to God.

The people who used to be on earth seemed still and silent to me. Forever they stand and stay, exactly as they were in this life. Whatever they were, that they stay -- to our view, anyhow. They seem like statues, each dressed in the way they would have been in life. Hippie beads and headbands have puritan era pilgrims behind them, and behind them the middle ages, all coiffed and trussed up are almost visible, and behind them I can make out the outlines of the Roman age.

Far away, the colors are faint and mellowed with age. Close by, there are people moving and speaking, and laughing and whining, and getting really really pissed off, and being overcome by joy. I'm sitting where I can look around a little. I am off to the side - in a sort of natural shelter made of the tree roots and undergrowth that happens where the earth slopes up steeply from a roadway.


From here, I can see more than I ever used to be able to, and when I see how people scramble and scratch and claw their way over rocks and brambles, and fight bravely on, I can also see now that everyone who does this does something inspiring and heroic. It's the people who refuse to go on that are to be pitied.

The ground slopes up from here. It moves toward God, who is the light at the top.

This image has been with me - in a thousand ways - for about five years now. Now I can see midlife as a sort of viewpoint, too. And I can begin to see how much I could not see from where I was, and I can make a fairly educated guess that there will be more blind spots and dangerous crossings ahead.

But I'm not going to sit here. I'm going to go on. The bags I leave here, to mark this spot, are the ones that carry my foolish assumptions about "knowing" things. It's obvious from here that the times I thought I knew the most were the places where I couldn't see a damn thing. When I thought I should be stronger, I was just a child, unaware of my human limitations. When I thought I was being stronger than anyone else, I was simply full of myself in the extreme - and utterly unaware of the power and courage of the sacrifices I would find later.

And when I thought that the people around me who limped just needed to buck up their ideas ... for that I repent. For my willful and intractable blindness toward the injuries and weaknesses of others, I repent. Those bags stay here.

This will be easier to carry:

Accept, O Lord, my entire liberty, my memory, my understanding, and my will. All that I am and have thou hast given to me; and I give all back to thee to be disposed of according to thy good pleasure. Give me only the comfort of thy presence and the joy of thy love; with these I shall be more than rich and shall desire nothing more.

Bored Brains Beebop-a-loo-bop

What a very interesting thing to have discovered! It's been out for awhile. Have you heard of it?

Sacks is perhaps best known for his collections of case histories from the far borderlands of neurological experience, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and An Anthropologist on Mars, in which he describes patients struggling to live with conditions ranging from Tourette's syndrome to autism, parkinsonism, musical hallucination, epilepsy, phantom limb syndrome, schizophrenia, retardation, and Alzheimer's disease.

But this morning, on NPR, I heard about the most fascinating phenomenon.

We are all, to some extent, human jukeboxes, able to program for pleasure and for reference. And while music sometimes sticks around longer than we would like — like a hit tune or an advertising jingle — for the most part we control what's inside our heads.

This story, however, describes what can happen when a person loses control.

For some people, the music comes unbidden, sticks around, makes too much noise and won't go away.

Apparently, in the brains of people who are going deaf, or who are simply profoundly BORED, the brain will stimulate itself! The music comes, unbidden. An auditory hallucination fills the ears with sound - and not sound the person even wants to hear!

But what makes it go away? How does the poor tortured patient make it stop?

By opening the actual ears to sounds outside the person's head.

This, it seems to me, is a very sharply drawn picture of everything else in human experience, is it not? We are not made to exist independently of our surroundings. We are not whole and entire in ourselves. We, in fact, become able to make our own surroundings if deprived of real ones. And if we are caught up in the sounds our own heads produce, what is the cure for this isolation? Open the ears. Take in the world. Hear.

What sensible counselor does not recommend this? What practical mother and grandmother do not say, "Are you sad? Do something for someone else. Are you bored? Take up a task. Any task. Are you overwhelmed? Do one small thing to restore your sense of mobility." It just makes sense that the brain would sing to us when we cannot hear anyone else. (But I think that I would not be bored to that level if I were alone on a sailboat.)