In Lent, in this mourning-time, when we prepare for resurrection but also for death, I hold up the tattered garment of this world like a prayer flag.
In it, I see more holes than wholeness. I see it scarred by wind and by the wars, which, on distant fields and in the heart, kill body and soul alike.
In Lent, in this cold winter butting angrily against a coming spring, we wait, yes, for the rising, but also for the falling: sun and moon and stars tumbling to a churning sea.
I stand before a sea churning with all the rage and desperate fear that made us rip the sunlight down, that loved a darkness it seemed to own more than a sun whose love burned and burned and was not tame.
— in Lent, before the rising, in Lent, when we prepare to fall, in Lent when the whole earth becomes a churning deep over which no Spirit hovers —
If I took up my staff to part the waters, I’d find myself a child, hysterical and tear-stained, beating waves with a stick, and crying that this is an age of no miracles.
The miracle is the falling.
Staff falling to earth; needle I’d mend the garment with falling into piles of hay; and, at last, myself falling to churning water, falling through rage and desperate fear, falling past that which kills body and soul alike, falling until
there is, at last a rising.
Me naked now on a shore bathed in sunlight.
Me holding no garment nor staff.
Me no longer Me at all.
No longer a hole in tattered fabric but rather one with the weave of it, a part of it, made whole.
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