reformation sunday

Let our bones be broken,
and re-knit anew.
Will you break our walls and teach us how to fight?
Will you break our genders and classes?

Our hates and habits are calcified:
Sedimented with the weight of race and nation.
Are you strong enough?
Are we strong enough for the breaking,
and for the reforming?

Make our pretty old churches new and ugly,
marked with the dirt of tragedy and fertility.
Mark us with ashes,
make us your own.

We are always in need of re-forming,
and we are always being re-formed.


(words are not enough... we must resort to bread...)

the church at night a bit

I went to the service at Primera Iglesia on Ash Wednesday. Here's a poem I wrote, after I went to fill up my water bottle in the kitchen and got to see the church at night a bit.

standing in the dark church
in the room that remembers
one thousand potlucks-
the walls pause with me in the darkness
as i go about my business
setting up or putting away.
puttering around the house of the Lord.

God promises one day I'll have a key,
to walk into the building, to prepare or wait
to stand in the dark church.
the simplest beauty.
the greatest honor.
puttering around the holy of holies.
sweeping up after the saints.

liturgical year meditation

So, today's Ash Wednesday.

And it feels good.

I just wasn't feeling Epiphany this year. Maybe I wasn't sitting with it long enough, but it was just not resonating for me. All this light imagery, and revealedness, when I've been spending so much time with Holy is the Dark, and God the Unrevealed, God the sneaky one around the corner, just barely visible but beautiful because of it.

So: Epiphany did not feel exactly like that.

And moreover, I'm not feeling the light imagery for other reasons. All this light/dark, good/evil, white/black stuff raises some really problematic questions about race. AND, all this sight/blindness stuff raises some other, perhaps-similarly-problematic questions about ability. So there's that, that gets in the way, appropriately, for me.

So: epiphany, not so much.

And today I told someone that I was glad it was Ash Wednesday, and usually that just means that it's time to enter the mourning/difficult/struggle time. But it feels really good this time. Like: Ash Wednesday means Lent is beginning. And Lent means that Easter is coming.

I'm often reassuring people that they don't have to rush into resurrection, or into Christmas or whatever. That's why they're seasons and not days, I say. And maybe this year I didn't really get much epiphany into me.

But, oh, Easter's coming.

And Sunday, I went to Hurlbut (my home church) for probably the last time with Ted (my longest-running pastor) as pastor. And he moved around the front of the sanctuary as he preached, naming all the spots we have seen Jesus. Jesus in the nativity scene, Jesus in the Christ Candle, Jesus in the cross, all the way through... Jesus in the pews. It was pretty beautiful. Seeing Jesus, running into that guy at all kinds of random places, and if you miss him this year, you know he'll just be waiting there again, when we come around once more.

My mom got me a poster of the liturgical year for Christmas. It's just a big round circle, with lots of different colors on it.

Alright.

-d

ps- A couple of posts ago, somefolks had its two hundredth post. Huzzah.