a week into Lent 2025

 

Lent is Time in the wilderness, purposefully, intentionally so, self-committal. Or we can run from it. 

What am I "Giving Up For Lent"? - - nothing physical anymore, chocolate, oysters, coffee, pennies into a mite box. I could give up going to bed early or rising early mornings, or opening Facebook and scrolling down to its endless idiocies of Coyote Down and carnivorous plants snapping shut on spiders. 

Or I could give up writing this more or less daily wandering nonsense. Or I could write it more sensibly. 

Or I could do or not do something or nothing.

I've given up pulpit and altar and that is enough. (I've answered three questions and that is enough, said his father, don't give yourself airs. Do you think I can listen all day to such stuff? Be off ere I kick you downstairs.*) 

That giving up for Lent takes me into the desert, where It creates an empty place. At a 2008 eight-day Credo retreat for retiring priests, we were told that it's SUPPOSED TO create an empty space and that our job is to live into the desert that the empty space is.

Happening at Lent works challengingly for Uncle Bubba here. 

If you're going to give up something for Lent, don't give up something that you're going back to on Sundays (Sundays are not part of Lent) or that you mean to resume on Easter: give up something that your soul and body NEEDS to give up permanently, such as smoking or hatred.

We're into a week of Lent 2025 and I'm wandering in some sort of spiritual desert, pondering my life; that my life at this stage is memories, my personal story that exists only in my mind. Sort of but not exactly in the same way that Christianity is our corporate story: 

At the first of ELOHIM creating the skies and the land--and the land was desolation and emptiness; and darkness was over the face of the deep, and the spirit of ELOHIM was hovering over the face of the waters--and ELOHIM said, "Let there be light"; and it was light. In the beginning was the Logos, and the Logos was with God and the Logos was God. All that is came into Being through the Logos. The beginning of the Gospel of Jesus Christ, the Son of God. And the Angel came, and Mary said Yes. And Jesus said This is my blood of the covenant which is poured out for many (and Matthew put on Jesus' lips For the forgiveness of sins) and Jesus said Today you will be with me in Paradise. And the Roman centurion said Truly this man was the Son of God. And the women fled, not saying nothing to nobody, because they were terrified.

Or I can read. In the February 17 & 24 issue of The New Yorker I read the essay "Tangled Web" about the lives of spiders in which the closing paragraph challenged me with, "... reminded of what none of us should ever forget, that reflexively hating anything alien to us is the beginning of evil. That is not just a lesson about spiders, of course."

And in Christian Wiman's "Zero At The Bone" - - "the realization that my life was a story, that I had some control over what seemed to me ... my own mind burning at night like an oil fire on water -- complete chaos. Selves are nothing but memories of selves, and memories but the wispy entities that Time and mind have conspired to keep. It's a wonder we don't walk though each other like ghosts." 

And then, still from Wiman, "When God entered contingency, when the miracle of existence--that Being should be at all--became the bare implacable fact of matter, there was no going back: either the incarnation is absolute, or it simply didn't happen. Either God is gone, or he never was."

So for Lent, I can give up Time and keep on reading Wiman, or I can give up Wiman. 

I won't be giving up Wiman: in a way, Wiman is the syrup that keeps the spider in the plant until it snaps shut on him.

nevertheless and notwithstanding,

Life is Good

RSF&PTL

T89&c

++++

* Lewis Carroll, "You are old, Father William, the young man said,"

for its own reasons and reasoning or algorithmic absurdity, Facebook has stopped including my first picture along with the link to my +Time blogpost. When it does that, I delete the link because I'm not going to post it without the picture. Nevertheless, the blogpost itself continues to be on my +Time blog, available to anyone who wants to bother going there. T+

Pondering the NASA deep space image is the beginning of my answer to the challenge "your God is too small." I could call it Earth And All Stars after the hymn, eh? T+

https://plusmoretime.blogspot.com/2025/03/monda-after-sunday-again.html