Trinity is about to end and I find my prayer practices are limping feebly toward its conclusion, just as they have limped feebly through most of Trinity. When I reflect on the expanse of the last twenty-something weeks I see, in my mind’s eye, a desert landscape. It is a dry, rocky expanse. It reminds me of the Coachella Valley: bordered by low-lying hills, roughly textured by boulders, sand, scrubby sagebrush, sheer sandstone cliffs, and little green-trunked trees that bloom with bright yellow flowers.
“Now is not the time for this.” I can think of few phrases that so capture the spirit of our age and its perspective as this. We are obsessed with schedule and itinerary and the control we believe they give us. Life must be arranged and it must be optimized. But as we all know, reality does not yield in this way, and few things reveal the objectivity and intractability of reality as death. We do everything we can to defer and distract from our reckoning with death; it’s never quite the right time to consider it, after all. And so we must see it as a severe mercy that we are halted this day and called to remember again.
What did we see? Holy Week knows some of the most visually-engaging and emblematic moments of the Church year. One of the iconic sights of Holy Week comes with the Easter Vigil: the lighting and procession of the Paschal candle. It is right to begin our mystagogy with this sight. As the Psalmist writes, “In Your light will we see light.” It is by this light that we begin to see everything else.
It sometimes surprises new practitioners of Lenten disciplines when they do the math and find that there are not forty but forty-six days between Ash Wednesday and Easter Sunday. How do we account for the additional days? It is then that they learn of Sunday as a blessed relaxation of the Fast in observance of our weekly remembrance of the Lord’s Day of Resurrection. The Lenten Sunday puts a point on what is true of every Sunday: it is both a looking back and a looking forward. It is a perpetual memorial of Easter until Christ returns to raise and judge the quick and the dead.
St. Edward was born around the year 1003 and died in 1066. He reigned as King of England from 1042 until his death. It was a time of extended peace. Edward was the last undisputed English king before the Norman Conquest. The militant nature of that conquest resulted, at least in part it seems, from the fact that Edward promised succession to both a Norman and an Englishmen and left them to fight it out at the Battle of Hastings.
Tomorrow is Trinity Sunday, and I can’t help but hear in my head the rock n’ roll classic hit, “Here I Go Again” by Whitesnake. Don’t mock me–it will forever and always be a rock and roll classic that will survive the ages and instantly bring me joy when I hear it. Just in case you’re not a regular listener of the “80’s on 8” Sirius XMU channel, to refresh your memory, the song opens with these lyrics:
On Tuesday we celebrated the Feast of St. Valentine, a third-century Christian martyr. The two most popular hagiographies about his life locate him in third-century Rome. They say he was a leader in the Church (either a bishop or a priest) who ministered to and supported Christians in a time of severe persecution under the emperor Claudius Gothicus…
Trinity is about to end and I find my prayer practices are limping feebly toward its conclusion, just as they have limped feebly through most of Trinity. When I reflect on the expanse of the last twenty-something weeks I see, in my mind’s eye, a desert landscape. It is a dry, rocky expanse. It reminds me of the Coachella Valley: bordered by low-lying hills, roughly textured by boulders, sand, scrubby sagebrush, sheer sandstone cliffs, and little green-trunked trees that bloom with bright yellow flowers…
