April is the cruelest month

April is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain...
— TS Eliot “The Waste Land”

This could be one of those posts titled “how it started/how it’s going”.  How it started? A 77oF day, with a glorious blue sky. The cherry tree behind my garage blossomed, and when I looked up from my desk through the open skylight I could see the branches framed, stark against the sky.  Like a James Turrell skyscape. Such tender, ephemeral beauty.

How is it going? A front came through, bring a deluge of rain. Beating the blossomed trees. Thunder rolled. Lightning made it look like broad daylight. An epic spring storm. Also, I left the skylight open. 

In principle this should not have been a problem. The roof windows are solar powered and have a sensor which detects rain and swiftly closes them. Except when it doesn’t. Which it didn’t. I came home from the first night of the parish mission — at which point it had been pouring for more than half an hour — to find water trickling down the wall. And  the bowl I keep on the altar in my prayer space with its (mostly irreplaceable) collection of prayer cards and notes and other spiritual ephemera was also collecting water. 

I hit the close button, took a breath, grabbed a towel from the closet and mopped. Then I picked up the bowl.

I started emptying it, laying the cards and notes out to dry. The beautiful Japanese book of pilgrim stamps that I have collected was dry, but the cards from friends’ funerals and ordinations. The notes from the kids. Markers had bled. Papers were so soaked there was no way to separate them. I could only wait to see what could come of it.

The next afternoon I sat on the floor and sorted. I let go what could not be saved, I spent some time reflecting on the bits of my friends and family’s lives that lived in this liminal holy space. Life and death. Memories stirred by spring rain. I grieved the loss of friends, rejoiced again with others joys - births and marriages and ordinations and professions of their vows. I laughed. I wept.

I washed the bowl and blessed it. And filled it once again, placing it on the altar where it might breed lilacs from the dead and the past.

So how is April going? Well, I am writing this in a 7th floor surgical waiting room in Philadelphia. Math Man is having emergency surgery to repair a detached retina. This is not the first April day I have spent waiting in a hospital for news of a husband in surgery while the world explodes with life. April is a cruel month.

 

Ultraviolet — light on the edge

 

Violet is the canonical liturgical color of Lent in Roman Catholic practice (and in many other traditions as well), at least since the 16th century and the Council of Trent. Much before that there were not universal norms for the colors of vestments and ancillary textiles.

Why violet? Red for martyrs seems obvious - the color of blood. White and gold for feasts is arguably apt. Green for the Ordinary days, mostly in the green summer months of the Northern hemisphere, seems reasonable. But how did purple, an expensive, rare color associated with royalty come to connote penance?

I did a bit of research this weekend, but didn’t surface anything particularly compelling. The most popular theory is it’s the color Jesus wore during the Passion (though the four evangelists do not agree on this point, Matthew says scarlet, kokkinēn in the Greek; Mark gives it as porphyran, purple; Luke merely describes it as resplendent; John, like Mark, has purple). The color points to Jesus as king, and so obviously it signifies penance. Which is not so obvious to me. Another theory is that the blossoms of violets (some, but not all of which are indeed violet) hang their heads, a penitential posture. 

I want to float another theory, violet is on the very edge of the light the human eye can perceive. (Weirdly, most of the light in the electromagnetic spectrum we cannot detect with our eyes, we do not have X-ray vision, or infrared detection.) Once you get beyond violet, as the light increases in energy, we can no longer see it. In Lent we stand at the precipice of Easter, at the edge of the resurrection, facing the mysteries just beyond our perceptions. 

Or perhaps it is because violet is the color of the sky just before dawn?

Fiat and lux

Fra Angelico's Annunciation in Florence;
Mary heavy with the weight of her fiat

Fiat. It brought a universe into being. Fiat lux — let there be light. With a breath an unbearable radiance poured into the darkness. Fiat, said Mary to Gabriel. And with a breath that infinite, unbearable Light poured into a young woman in a small town, until she swayed with the weight of it. Fiat, cried Jesus in the garden of Gesthemane. Once again the universe was borne on a breath, carried across the shoulders of God incaranate.

We hear these assents as “let it be done to me.” Yet the Greek word Luke uses in this Gospel -- genoito -- means more than passive assent. It whispers of birth and growth, of what might we become. None of the events set in motion by these fiats are complete, they were each a “yes” to becoming. The light that tore through the darkness all those billions of years ago is still flaring out, igniting suns whose light will not reach us for a hundred billion years. 

Mary said yes to becoming the Christ-bearer. Even now she bears our prayers aloft, swaying under the weight of our needs.  And with a word ripped from the depths, Jesus became the redeemer of our sins past and present and even of the future. Light still careening through our darkness, moving heaven and earth. 

Light has no weight the physicists tell us. Except when it is in motion. Then it has power that can sweep the dust of dead stars together with enough force to bring the very earth we stand on into being. Dare I take on the weight of light? Dare I say “yes”  to moving toward what God hopes for me?  

Fiat.  Fiat lux. Let me be aflame with the Gospel, heavy with the light of Christ.

_____________

A version of this reflection appeared in Give Us This Day on March 25, 2023.

Socks and the Second Law

 

The second law of thermodynamics can be framed as the desire for the universe for disorder. Things, left to their own devices, will get messier. Sorted stacks of papers gradually get scrambled. Ice melts. Socks become unpaired.

There were a weeks’s worth of socks, 8 pairs, in the laundry. What did I get back? Ten socks total - only 2 pairs. Where did the rest go? Great question. Entropy rules.

This present moment

In some sense it always Advent, even now in Lent. We are pilgrims, ever leaning into the future. To quote Walter Burghardt, SJ, “every tomorrow has it’s own tomorrow”. We are always waiting. Yet. Yet we are living now, in this precise moment. It is all we have. The past has slipped through our fingers, the future is for the moment unknowable. It can feel like we are merely marking time, or enduring the storms that rage. Yet. Yet we can live, not wrapped in our own thoughts, but awake to the needs that present themselves now, awake to each other, awake to God…

Walter Burghardt, SJ in an Advent homily.

“I have one swift answer: live in hope! Both words are important, indispensable, irreplaceable: hope and live. You must be men and women of ceaseless hope, because only tomorrow can today's human and Christian promised be realized; and every tomorrow will have its own tomorrow, world without end. Every human act, every Christian act, is an act of hope. But that means you must be men and women of the present, you must live this moment – really live it, not just endure it – because this very moment, for all its imperfection and frustration, because of its imperfection and frustration, is pregnant with all sorts of possibilities, is pregnant with the future, is pregnant with love, is pregnant with Christ.

If you want to lift Advent from liturgy to life, don't waste your days with sheer waiting. Wait indeed, for tomorrow promises to be rich in life and love. But life and love are here today, because God is here today — because your brothers and sisters are here today.”