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I promise I’m not trying to derail the solemnity of Lent with this post, this is all my personal, humble reflection, nor am I trying to deliberately contradict any of the observances in the
Preface of Lent enumerated in its invitation ("... self-examination and repentance ... prayer, fasting, and self-denial ... reading and meditating on God's holy Word..."), but I'm finding, in my advanced years, that I'm getting crotchety. People (read: MainStreamMedia, Christianists, and politicians) keep using broad strokes when painting definitions of ordinary matters, assigning absolutes to words which exist in a flux, and I’m pretty tired of being manhandled. I ran to the open, loving arms of the
Domestic and Foreign Missionary Society of the Protestant Episcopal Church in the United States of America because I was promised the “three-legged stool”, the three-fold sources of authority in Anglicanism being scripture, tradition, and REASON as, it is said, these three sources uphold and critique each other in a dynamic way.
I think my cranky nature this Lent is due to the, er, vibrant, um, discourses during this election cycle with so many people pontificating with very little forethought or consequence to their words, and many of these absolutes are being attributed to this being I’m in contact with, God, these teachings I study by this Rabbi, Jesus, and this movement I espouse, Christianity.
Ahem. Sorry.
The topic of my assignment is
The Third Station in The Way of the Cross, Jesus Falls the First Time. The collect at this station reads:
O God, you know us to be set in the midst of so many and great dangers, that by reason of the frailty of our nature we cannot always stand upright: Grant us such strength and protection as may support us in all dangers, and carry us through all temptations, through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen. (BOS, '94)
The tradition of
The Way of the Cross fixes Jesus with three “falls”: he falls on stations three, seven, and nine. In earlier iterations, there were Seven Falls and they were considered less literal falls and more pauses, depictions of Jesus coincidentally being prostrate, or nearly so, during performance of some other activity like some of the current stations, Jesus meeting his Mother and Jesus consoling the women of Jerusalem.
I’ve watched a lot of folks for a lot of years practicing many different “brands” of Christianity, in praise and in worship, and sometimes there is some propensity for some, especially during Lent, to adopt a “pious” attitude which is almost dramatic, like, as if they have to “act” repentant like they’re being filmed. That’s dreadfully Judge-ie McJudge-ster of me, I know, and I promise I’ll repent … it is Lent, after all. But I think Lent makes people do silly things, like, the “I’m giving up chocolate” kids or the sackcloth-and-ashes kids who are determined to read the entire Bible during Lent or to me, the saddest of all, the kids who feel so overwhelmed by all the perceived impositions and restrictions of Lent that they give up and do nothing and then feel horrible about themselves the entire time.
Then as if all of Lent’s judgments and restrictions aren’t bad enough, we are being bombarded lately with declarations of what is “holy” and what is “right” and what is “Christian” and what is “American” and what is “patriotic” and what is “traditional” and it’s driven many to self-loathing and destructive behaviours, even to the point of suicide, and it’s kept many people from coming home to God because they HEAR they SHOULD be ashamed and that their love and homes and children are not valid and that their desires are sin when, in fact, they were knit perfectly this way in their mother’s wombs. I just want to scream at the top of my lungs, “ENOUGH!”
Before I came to scriptural terms with the gift of my same-sex orientation, I read unfortunate translations of the Bible and was in a continuous shame spiral. I thought for years that every time I found a man attractive I was “in sin”. I was decades in to my healing upon my first few visits to St. Luke’s and I distinctly remember the sun from the windows streaming through the smoke, and listening to Bobby’s beautiful bass reading a long passage, and seeing this guy a few pews up who I thought was mighty cute, and I started dreaming about the matching outfits we would wear at the Easter vigil, and wondering if we were too old to have kids, and devising the order I was going to introduce him to my friends, and what what WHAT ?! and a wave of the ‘ole SHAME came over me. I was thinking inappropriate thoughts and sinning in church! Same-sex attraction is intrinsically disordered and Church is an inappropriate place for such musings! Then I looked at the altar and saw women priests who mirror the Jewish women of the first century, Christianity’s first priests, and I remembered where I was and I shook myself silly and remembered that my dreaming was exactly what intrinsically ORDERED people have been doing for time immemorial. Church is the PERFECTLY appropriate place to weave the fantasies of my marriage because all my life God has had it in my heart that one day I would find a man who was as in love with God as I am, and one day I would be sitting with him tucked under my arm while we listened to a Sermon while we worshipped God in the house of God among our spiritual family in our home parish.
It is meet and right so to do !
I think this year I feel it more instructive for me to take a lead from the thought of “Jesus pausing” and not of Him “falling” … which puts me in mind of the contemporary meaning for the Psalm’s
Selah, a pause, a breath to weigh the gravity of what was just heard, what is settling on our spirit. To reasonably self-examine – not to the world’s standards but the standards of what Jesus said were the greatest commandments: to love God and love our neighbor; repentance – for all the times I fall short under the weight of those enormous requirements; prayer –that I would hear only God’s voice and not the world’s when examining myself; fasting – from all the negative garbage coming at me from the world; and self-denial – from pity parties I throw for myself when God tasks me and I-don’t-wanna! And to always remember that
strength and protection as may support us in all dangers comes from reading and meditating on God's holy Word, truly an instant spa treatment which replenishes us and fills us and rejuvenates us with peace and joy and love, which will
carry us through all our temptations and allow us to relax in self and reach out to serve.
