Metanoia

I have been thinking about this problem of Lent. Like many of my sisters whose children have vanished from our lives, I don't see the need to "manufacture" a time of attentiveness to sorrow, to repentance, to sin, to error. I am very, very attentive to all of those things. I don't need a separate season in which to immerse myself in awareness and regret. I am consumed by them.

The word metanoia is the Greek word for repentance, for turning. In Hebrew, shuv means return. Return to me with your whole heart, says the prophet. Many sermons delivered during this time of year reflect upon one or both of those words.

What would I say, if I had to say something? Return is no longer in my vocabulary.

Turn?

To something new?

Incline. Perhaps incline.

Incline implies a certain hesitance, a degree of fragility, an experimental move.

Incline.

So here's the deal. I bought myself a Christmas present, an SLR digital camera with an extra (slightly) telephoto lens, and I took it to the Keys over Christmas, and The Quiet Husband ended up in the hospital, and so I know nothing at all about my new camera.

On Thursday I take my last final exam and then I have 18 days before I have to go back to school. I have a lot to do during those two weeks, including a paper in which I have to address some unintelligible material, but no long drives and a lot of the intensity of my life temporarily removed therefrom.

I am going to learn a little about my new camera during the first week, and I am going to take it with me for a couple of retreat days the second week, and I am going to start photographing the words metanoia and shuv.

I have absolutely no idea what means. But I don't think I can start to live them until I see them, really see them, in unexpected ways.

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(Image: Twisted Oak by Tess Kohrnak, here. I tried google-imaging the word metanoia, and found nothing helpful, and then I tried the word twisted, and this is what I came up with. I don't mean twisted in a negative kind of way, but in a turned, inclined kind of way. I wonder what I will come up with for myself.)

The Strangest of Times

Lent is a strange season for a Protestant seminarian.

My last class of the quarter met this morning. Last term my one third-year required course was in church and sacraments, a wonderful class in which our professor repeatedly nudged us to consider ways in which we might make use of Word and Sacrament in order to offer our future congregations more clarity with respect to who they are.

Over the winter the major requirement has been missiology, another terrific class, this time with the professor nudging us to understand the church as the community from which we are sent forth, as God is by nature a sending God. After class today I laughed as I told the professor that we are going to need 50-hour Sundays to accomplish all the things he and his colleagues are telling us we need to do.

As I drove home, I thought about the similar to-do lists that have been at least implied by our professors in theology, in Scripture, in pastoral care, in homiletics. The combination is daunting. I also thought about the very wise words a classmate shared with me a couple of days ago. She spent a couple of years between college and seminary in China and related that it has been said of such an experience that "People go there for a week and write a book; they go for a month and write an article; they go for a year and are silent."

It's true of anything, I suppose: The more you learn, the less capable you feel of instructing anyone else. We have been filled with words, and words about words, for nearly three years. We are Presbyterians, most of us, and we believe in the one Word, Jesus Christ, and in the Word of Holy Scripture, and in the possibility that our own words will make their own small contribution in service of the others. But we know that we are much like Americans who have been to China for a year, and should at least at times be reduced to silence in view of what we have witnessed.

Silence. It is a subject we have not formally explored in these three years. And here it is Lent again and it seems to me that the only genuine response to make is one of silence. Silence before the great and terrible mystery of suffering. Silence in the face of a God who shares in the most human of experiences with the purpose of shattering its power.

I do not expect, not yet this year, to be prepared for suffering to be demolished. Easter will, once again, come far too soon. And I will not look particularly silent on the outside; I have too many responsibilities that preclude an outer demeanor of contemplation.

But inside, I am already gone: way, way down into the silence of Lent. It will seem like a noisy season to me in the exterior worlds in which I spend my time, worlds which will be filled with music and preaching and teaching and other forms of oral expression, all of them in dissonant contrast to the silence of the interior world I carry with me.

I am watching the men's Olympic figure skating finals as I write this. It occurs to me that these athletes, surrounded as they are by crowds and cheers and applause, must also enter deep wells of silence, invisible to the rest of us. Perhaps this season of my life is my own personal Olympics. On the outside: focus, determination, an endless series of tasks.

On the inside, the silence that offers the space for possibility, for hope, for encounter.

Ash Wednesday Prayer

VI.

Although I do not hope to turn again
Although I do not hope
Although I do not hope to turn

Wavering between the profit and the loss
In this brief transit where the dreams cross
The dreamcrossed twilight between birth and dying
(Bless me father) though I do not wish to wish these things
From the wide window towards the granite shore
The white sails still fly seaward, seaward flying
Unbroken wings

And the lost heart stiffens and rejoices
In the lost lilac and the lost sea voices
And the weak spirit quickens to rebel
For the bent golden-rod and the lost sea smell
Quickens to recover
The cry of quail and the whirling plover
And the blind eye creates
The empty forms between the ivory gates
And smell renews the salt savour of the sandy earth

This is the time of tension between dying and birth
The place of solitude where three dreams cross
Between blue rocks
But when the voices shaken from the yew-tree drift away
Let the other yew be shaken and reply.

Blessèd sister, holy mother, spirit of the fountain, spirit of the garden,
Suffer us not to mock ourselves with falsehood
Teach us to care and not to care
Teach us to sit still
Even among these rocks,
Our peace in His will
And even among these rocks
Sister, mother
And spirit of the river, spirit of the sea,
Suffer me not to be separated

And let my cry come unto Thee.


(from T.S. Eliot, Ash Wednesday)

Lent

I've been attending the New Members' Class at my field ed church, and today a young lady, a high school student who's planning to join the church with her mother, drew me aside and asked me to explain what Lent is and to give her some suggestions for participating in it.

Two weeks ago, my best friend at seminary asked whether I wanted to join her at the church we went to two years ago for the Ash Wednesday service. I quickly said yes, remembering only the next day how traumatized I was by last year's service at my home church, when I had realized too late that I did not want anything to do with those ashes, since I have an urn full of them in my own home. I have not yet decided what I am going to do this week.

At any rate, Lent is coming, and it is going to pull me into its vortex, regardless of what I say or do about it. Last year I posted my response to the first reading; I am going to have to give some thought to what, if anything, has changed with the passing of another twelve months.

Jan has posted a wonderful selection of resources for the upcoming season. I haven't looked at all of them, but so far I especially like this little calendar from Explore Faith.

My Jesuit list:

from the Jesuit Retreat House in Cleveland,

from Creighton University;

from the Loyola Press Ignatian Spirituality site.

It all comes down to the same two quotes I was thinking about as Lent loomed on the horizon a year ago:

You cannot conceive...nor can I or anyone -- the appalling strangeness of the mercy of God.

~ Graham Greene, Brighton Rock

Love in action is a harsh and dreadful thing compared with love in dreams.

~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov