Christ is Risen

and I haven't stopped grinning since.

Alleluia!

It's probably about 15 years since I was in church for Maundy Thursday and Good Friday services, and then they would have been very different.

This is all feeling rather new, at the same time as being rather familiar.

I had been feeling nervous about foot washing last night. I was feeling quite strange about it, not wanting anyone to wash my feet... not because I'm ticklish or embarrassed about my feet, particularly, but because it feels like I should be washing someone else's feet, not the other way around. It feels backwards.

But that's a false dichotomy. Gifts need recipients... we can each give and receive, we can each love and be loved.

How can I relate to the Cross if I can't even let someone else wash my feet? How can I accept that ultimate gift from God if I can't accept Gentle Vicar kneeling with pitcher and towel?

So the time came, and I went with the others and had my feet washed, and it was fine. It still felt backwards, but it was fine.

I loved the silent vigil afterward. So often for me, singing is the way to become aware of God's presence. Silence can be awkward... am I supposed to say something? Do something? Short silences in the liturgy make me feel nervous. They always seem either too long, or not long enough. I get stuck in a cycle of worrying about whether I'm supposed to be ready for the next bit, whether I've forgotten someone, whether I might be doing it wrong. In chant or song I often lose that, lose track of worrying about myself, because my whole self is in the song, takes on the song, becomes the song.

The longer silence in darkness was more like singing. My mind was not exactly quiet. I sat there, sometimes with other people and sometimes not, turning over various problems, asking God to be present to various people in various situations. How can I explain? I don't believe that God is ever not with us. I don't believe God could be there in the chapel of repose last night but not also with me now as I sit in front of my computer. But my perception was different, changed, maybe by the silence and darkness, maybe by the preceding liturgy, and God seemed very present.

I didn't really want to leave.

For this morning's Gospel reading we had a sort of dramatized version, with a narrator and different people taking different spoken parts. I loved that our reader, who is female, was reading the part of Christ. I don't know if anyone else noticed.

I did find it all rather short. I'm not sure if Nearest Church doesn't do the entire liturgy or if I'm still accustomed to the longer services in Judaism, but it seems odd to be out by early afternoon. What am I to do with the rest of the day? It doesn't seem right to treat it as a normal day, getting on with bits and pieces of work and study, or to spend time catching up on housework. It doesn't seem right to treat it as a usual day off, relaxing and resting and reading fiction or cooking fancy food. This day feels as if it should be like Yom Kippur, no participation in any of the 39 melachot, no eating, drinking, washing, wearing leather (a luxury), hours and hours and hours of liturgy. Instead I am at something of a loose end.

And yet there are no "normal" days, just as there is no "ordinary" time... if God is with me at church but also out in the world, God is with me when I pray but also when I go about my work, which is even another sort of prayer, if you will. But I am a creature of liturgy, of habit, of susceptibility to ritual, and setting aside times and places to focus on God helps to increase my awareness of God the rest of the time and in the rest of the places. This day is a set aside time.

So I will go for a walk, I think, and I will go back to Nearest Church and sit in silence a while, again.

On balance.

I still agree with what I said yesterday, but it wasn't very complete, made some huge assumptions.

I said if something ceases to be a labour of love, you should stop and re-think. I said self-improvement can be about God, if it means discovering and becoming who we are.

But that doesn't mean we should all just do whatever we feel like all the time.

I may enjoy chocolate and sweets, but I have a body to look after and too much of them won't do me any good. I may love stretching and relaxing but if I don't get up and move around I will become ill. Looking after the body I have been given is somewhat complicated, as it comes with some non-standard variations which in this society are seen as medical problems... but even if I were "healthy", the same would apply. Taking good care of myself means recognising that my instincts may be incorrect, or that I may be so far out of touch with my instincts that I need to base my decisions on some general rules or principles.

I think the same is true of my relationship with God. No, I should not do things that I do not do out of love -- but that doesn't mean that I will always be ecstatically happy about everything I undertake. My short-term will and my long-term goals may be out of sync. My ability to discern God's will for my life may be unreliable, or even absent.

God gives us freedom to ignore God, freedom to refrain from an active relationship with God... in order that we can truly enter that relationship in love, not out of fear.

But that means the relationship can be absent or distant. It means we can go about our merry ways, oblivious. We can become so distracted that we don't listen to God's calling to us, Beloved,, or so wrapped up in our own lives that we don't even think to look at the loving work we could do in the world.

I think that's part of why it's important for many people to spend some time in solitude, away from the clamour of all the things that we allow to make claims on our time and energy, away from the people we serve not because we love them adn they need, but for some other reason. Sometimes in the silence we can hear.

I think that just as surely it is important to be part of human communities, to open our eyes to one another's wounds, to see something of God in the earnest schoolteacher, in the lady who does the church flowers... to see Christ in the people we would classify as "good" or "friends" or "saintly" and in those we might rather avoid: the sick, the distressed, the poor; the ones who have been taught no manners at all; the abusive parent, the alcoholic sibling. Even the people who have hurt us most, the people who are most frightening to us, the people who seem monstrous, are beloved children of God.

We are called to share what we have. That means being honest with ourselves and others about what we have, and about what we don't have.

Learning to look after my body means listening to my instincts, but also observing what happens when I do some things or avoid others. It means consulting people who are experts, at least some of the time, and gathering information from others. I cannot look after my body by ignoring every symptom I have until it becomes crippling; neither can I look after my body by allowing slight aches and pains to send me to bed wailing of my discomfort. There is a continual process of observation, fact-checking, reflection. I have to be willing to find out that I am wrong, that I have been mistaken, if I am to learn well.

So, too, with a relationship with God. I need the reflective solitude and I need the close-knit community and I need the extended fellowship. To discern God's will for me in the world, I need to listen to God and I need to look at the world, and if I neglect either then I run the risk of destroying myself in vain to serve others, or harming others to serve my own short-term whims.

Perhaps Lent is, if anything, a time of examination rather than penitence, a time of exploration rather than contrition. Oh, penitence and contrition will probably come along anyway if we see, in our examination and exploration, how badly we have treated one another. But they aren't the purpose, they aren't the point.

As for the claim that you don't need Lent to do that -- no, but we time-bound humans tend to function well with a certain amount of cyclical routine. I don't need Christmas to learn about Emmanuel, God-with-us, but it helps. I don't need St Valentine's Day to know Sweetie loves me or to tell him how very much I love him, and indeed we often don't do anything special that day, but when we do it is a pleasure. And frankly, I do schedule time to be especially aware of God. I make time for Morning Prayer, why not make time for Lent? I use an alarm clock, why not a calendar?

And after the fire

Evensong on Sunday was wonderful. Not just because I got to see Deacon Friend, which always makes me pretty happy, but because the sermon she gave seemed so relevant. I hadn't heard her preach before, and didn't realise she was going to be speaking last night. I'm very glad I made the journey to Leafy Suburb Church, even though it meant I got home late.

That marks six weeks and counting of going to church every Sunday. A year ago you'd never have convinced me this would happen, even if most of the services have been Evensong. I've changed such a lot in a year. It's appropriate, then, that the subject of the sermon was transformation.

A few things stood out for me. One was the acknowledgment that being open to God and to the possibility of transformation can be a frightening thing; changes in ourselves and in others can be scary, especially when we don't yet understand what's going on. I've certainly felt that in my own life and I don't really know how to deal with it, though I think I'm improving in some respects.

Fear is a very powerful thing, perhaps the closest thing to evil that I can bring myself to believe in. Much of my depression, I think, was related to how I responded to fear. I allowed it to rule my life. My comfort zones got smaller and smaller as I shied away from any discomfort or uncertainty, and the fear only got bigger. Eventually I was so tired of being scared that it just wasn't worth it to try any more. Retreat and withdrawal seemed like the only options.

I still get scared. I've always been cautious, easily frightened, perhaps more sensitive than I should be to life's lack of stability and consistency. I can't say what changed, exactly, and I can't point to all of how it changed, but my response to fear is different now than it used to be. Oh, I still have days where I hide under the duvet, unwilling to cope with life, but I choose them strategically now, and they don't spiral out of control. I still get discouraged, but somewhere along the line I learned to hope that tomorrow will be better, to let myself believe that things might improve. I still get frightened, especially when my mental state has been patchy for a while, but having experienced recovery once I know it's possible to experience it again, and that helps a lot. I haven't become an optimist, exactly, but I'm a lot less likely now to write off the world just because it is sometimes terrifying.

That's a pretty powerful transformation, at least from my perspective, and I don't really know how it happened. I can point to lots of little things, but adding them up doesn't seem to balance with the sort of change I've felt.

Which brings me to another point from last night's sermon: that transformation can happen on many levels. Sometimes learning a new perspective sheds new light on a subject and our thinking is transformed. I am blessed to see this in my teaching work: a student understands something and the light goes on, and in that instant they are transformed by delight. Other times transformation can be more profound: someone who has recovered from a serious illness or addiction can seem like a completely different person afterward. That sort of caterpillar-into-butterfly metamorphosis can be frightening to watch and frightening to undergo because it is so far-reaching. It has the potential to be extremely disruptive. But it can be a wonderful, inspiring thing to witness.

DF said in her sermon that the transformation Christians seek is to become more Christ-like: more loving, more merciful, more just, more compassionate, more encouraging, more faithful. If that's what Christianity is all about then sign me up! I'm not sure that isn't what most religion is about, though. I think Karen Armstrong might point out that increasing compassion is a major component of at least the three Abrahamic faiths as they are today, as well as that of several Eastern religions. But I digress. The point was that the sort of transformation Christians seek is to become more Christ-like, and that can be inconvenient, uncomfortable, frightening, disruptive. It changes lives.

And it's contagious. In loving others more fully, in forgiving those who harm us, in seeking to meet the needs of those less fortunate than ourselves, in encouraging those who struggle, in consoling the unhappy and fighting for the justice of the oppressed, what we do is teach people, by powerful example, that they are loved, they are worthwhile, they are valued. When they learn this they will often turn around and try to do the same for others. When they see that it is through God's grace that kindness has been done to them, they will seek God's grace themselves. And we don't have to say a word about it, we don't have to tell them how it's done, we don't have to push them to accept anything that's hard for them to believe, we just have to take loving, kind action. That's my understanding of what she was saying, anyway.

That has certainly been my experience with a number of people. Appropriately, DF is one example of someone who has been hugely influential in my own spiritual searching, despite--or perhaps because of--her complete acceptance of where I am now and her steadfast refusal to push her own belief system on anyone else. She helped me, a lot, when I most needed it and when she could have just walked away. I've seen her do the same or similar for many other people. Her capacity for loving, kind action astounds me. It has long been clear to me that her kindness to others is a result of her own relationship with God. I see the way she treats others, her commitment to the wellbeing of everyone she meets, and I am inspired. I want to live that way. And if her way of life is a result of a relationship with God, then I need to cultivate a relationship with God. And so here I am, cultivating that relationship with the aim of augmenting compassion, in the ways that I know how: reading scripture, praying daily, going to church of all things, and she didn't have to say a word. She didn't bother telling me the word, she just got on with living it as best she could.

That leads to the third point of her sermon, one that is perhaps most difficult for me. It was a suggestion of silence as a valuable means of seeking such transformation. I don't doubt that it's useful. I don't doubt that most of us, in this busy, noisy world, need more time for contemplation, more silence and stillness in our lives. But stillness and silence have never come easily to me. The closest I come to having a mind free of scampering, skittering thoughts is when I am playing or singing music, which is hardly something that counts as silence. My head is full of words and sounds and pictures, and all my efforts to clear it have failed; the best I seem to be able to do is to fill it with words, sounds and pictures that inspire and encourage me rather than cause me to feel desolation and despair. I don't know if silent contemplation or meditation would be transformative for me: I never get that far. The closest I get is in song.

So which hymn did we sing? This one, of course:

Jesus, these eyes have never seen
that radiant form of thine;
the veil of sense hangs dark between
thy blessèd face and mine.

I see thee not, I hear thee not,
yet art thou oft with me;
and earth hath ne'er so dear a spot
as where I meet with thee.

Yet, though I have not see, and still
must rest in faith alone;
I love thee, dearest Lord, and will,
unseen but not unknown.

When death these mortal eyes shall seal,
and still this throbbing heart,
the rending veil shall thee reveal
all glorious as thou art.

The veil of sense hangs dark between thy blessed face and mine. That sounds about right for my incessant attempts to make logical sense of something I actually believe to be ineffable. I really want to understand this... I really want to understand how Jesus fits into this world, this life, my life. It's proving difficult. The Trinity is not an easy concept for a rationalist like myself, and all I get from reading everyone from Tom Wright to Paul M Collins to Karen Armstrong is that some very influential Christians also don't think it's an easy concept... but while it doesn't make sense to me, thinking about God in Trinitarian terms gets in the way of thinking about God in terms of what I should do next. Veil of sense indeed! At the moment the only time I believe in a triune God is when I'm singing about it. The rest of the time, my concept of God is one of overwhelming unity and interconnectedness, of infinite wholeness.

I will give more thought to silence. I will keep trying. But in the meantime, I'm going to keep singing.