Welcome to Lent!
I should write about what I’m giving up, right? Well. Yes. I should (have).
I’m a week late, I know.
But there was an ice storm.
First there was a day of rain. Ominous and beautiful, water falling onto branches, sidewalks, power lines. The temperature dropped. The world turned crystalline, everything catching the light.
Light but also weight.
In the night, branches groaned beneath the weight of water whose kiss had lingered too long and become a bruise. They snapped; lines came down in arcing flashes of electric flame.
Houses went dark and cold. I spent an early evening walking with the dogs among downed branches, giving cables coiled in the road a wide berth, as you might a snake with a rattle or a mouth full of cotton. Our route serpentined, turning and then turning back.
So Lent, season of reflection, slipped from my field of vision as I reflected on how the very foundation of things can crack and break and fall away in a matter of moments, in wind and rain.
I thought, Sunday morning, as I sat down to write, that I needed to recapture, in words, the season as I had imagined it: An orderly progression of prayers I chose to pray, gifts I chose to give, sacrifices I intended to make.
The words dried up. I found I had nothing to say.
I retrieved a bible from the shelf in the living room and read again the story of Christ’s temptation. How he was led into the wilderness, forty days and forty nights in a desert, fasting. I imagined scorpions skittering across stones, serpents coiled in the sun, and none of that mattering as much as the hunger, coiled also, first deep in the belly and then in the bones.
Later, at church, in prayer, the words beat a tattoo in my mind along with the rhythm of my breath: in and out; bread and stones; bread and stones.
Stones turned to dust and then made soil; soil made wheat, made bread, made flesh and then, that too, made dust again. All things tending toward bread and stones; how bread must have called to him from those stones.
He cannot have known, walking into a wilderness, what sacrifice the desert might require or imagined how hunger narrows the field of vision, serpents wavering in the heat at the edges of his eyes, which were focused on a stone. How it might split open, rock really only crust, and inside, bread, warm and ready for him.
“Say the word and you will have bread from stones.”
But he said no.
He went without complaint to the high mountain where the cities were spread below.
I stood with him there in my mind’s eye, the moment frozen and crystalline — everything catching the light. And I saw in a flash of arcing flame how brittle it all was. How its splendor would crack and break and fall away at the merest touch, in puff of wind or sprinkle of rain. All power illusion, all riches despair.
I stood with him there where hunger had become a friend. I saw the snake coiled companionably about his arm, and the scorpion standing at inquisitive attention, peering up at him.
I saw words poured down from heaven to fill him up: “You are beloved,” and saw how he, so filled, could walk, naked and hungry, to any door in those sparkling cities and be welcomed in, because — well, because he brought with him what is more than bread — bread from heaven, bread of love made flesh and bone, broken and eaten, but not consumed, tending no longer toward dust or stone.
Then I was alone in a desert for three days trying to write this thing that I am now writing. I went back in prayer, scribbled in my notebook, wrote a little here, a little there, but always walked away unsatisfied.
This morning, prayed again. Wrote again. Thought again. I thought of what it was that I had intended to sacrifice: that tendency of mine to insist on being right, or rather, at least, to always seem to know what I am doing.
That paralyzing fear of ever having to ask a question, prideful insistence on my own perfection. Freezing stare that renders the world and all the people in it brittle and crystalline figures I imagine I control. The one that leaves me frozen out of all the houses where the warmth and fire is, looking in, lonely, through icy windows.
I prayed I might lay down my stones, stop trying to gnaw at them, be filled instead by words like bread come down from heaven:
You are beloved. Take off your ragged, filthy clothes, be wrapped instead in light and heat, arcing flashes of electric flame, the world, and you, made new. Come with me to the desert, the gateway to the feast.
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