Lent Thursday
Lent, second day, first Thursday. One way of "giving up for Lent" might be to free some of my wasted daily Time. Not that I always need to be productively engaged, which would be a conscience projection of my workaholic Navy years, but nowadays in total retirement I'm noticing that not all of my Time is fruitfully used. In fact, I waste a lot of Time every day, Time when I could be contemplating as a lenten discipline. It could be about different things, and it doesn't need to be totally serious, it might just be stopping for a moment or a bit to think about something that floats through my mind, eh?
Yesterday was Ash Wednesday, last evening we went to church for our Ash Wednesday liturgy that includes not only reading from Matthew's gospel, receiving the imposition of ashes (and keeping the ash cross on our foreheads regardless that Jesus told us "wash your face" instead of going about showing how pious we are); but, perhaps primarily, saying together the Ash Wednesday Litany, which is a long, theologically self-examining confession.
I like to believe that, this one Time a year, maybe at least just this once each year, as we and the Church move into Lent, we say our confession with more thought than a usual Sunday rote. Indeed, I read lots of conversation on Facebook yesterday, about how pointedly apt this lenten litany of confession is to our life today as people of God and as Americans.
Different petitions of the litany were held up as needing to be foremost in our minds as baptized Christians; Christians, that is, whose focus is not on saving ourselves from Hell when we die, but on living out our Baptismal Covenant.
Now is where my brief contemplation comes to mind: most Sundays we say a corporate confession as part of our eucharistic liturgy and hear a priestly absolution, intended in part to help us feel, and perhaps be, more spiritually cleansed for approaching the altar to receive the sacrament of Holy Communion, than we would be if we didn't pause to take that sin-absolving step, a spiritual bath or at least a spiritual, ritual washing of hands.
But, I am a skeptic. The Church offers several forms of confession, and there's one that seems to be the most prayed in congregations these days since the 1959 BCP came into use. It has a line, "we are truly sorry, and we humbly repent." My sense of it as both parish priest and member of the congregation is that this is nonsense; nonsense because we say it as rote. Not at all to be snide, but simply reading it off the page or parroting it if we know it by heart. My sense of it these years of our saying it in company every Sunday morning is that we are NOT truly sorry, and we do NOT humbly repent. We say it (or read it) because it's on the page. We do not pray it mindfully, thoughtfully, sincerely; the priest stands before us and says words while making the sign of the cross over us, and then we stand for The Peace. We did it last Sunday, and we'll repeat it all again next Sunday, we have done year in and year out, and we will say it into the sunset; it's become rote.
Object! I object - - that we've let our corporate confession slide to where it's just one more thing we do together in church on Sundays. I'll say it again: we are not truly sorry, and we do not humbly repent, it's just words anymore. And does God actually listen every week, and take us to heart every week, pardon and deliver us every week? That's not what I'm about here, God is incomprehensible beyond my imagining, I'm about us here.
Part of the problem is abuse of liturgical words that the church means to be so deep. They are so deep, in fact, that they should be in the liturgy for the sacrament of personal confession, which our church calls Reconciliation of a Penitent; but not up to be said every week by an assembly of folks who are just doing the liturgy. Read "Twelve Story Mountain," in which Thomas Merton takes serious issue with the Episcopal Church based on his own life experience living and worshiping with members of his family who were Episcopalians (they do the liturgy and go home, it has nothing to do with their lives); it's been many years since I read it, but Merton left me feeling seriously chastised and inadequate before God, and challenged.
As I said earlier, the church offers us any number of forms of Confession. The best one for the corporate form that is our tradition instead of personal confession that is the tradition of the Roman Catholic Church does not have people every week saying things that are not so for everyone; or, I submit, for most, or even for many. The best one is in our supplemental book "Enriching Our Worship 1," on page 56:
God of all mercy,
we confess that we have sinned against you,
opposing your will in our lives.
We have denied your goodness in each other,
in ourselves, and I the world you have created.
We repent of the evil that enslaves us,
the evil we have done,
and the evil done on our behalf.
Forgive, restore, and strengthen us
through our Savior Jesus Christ,
that we may abide in your love
and serve only your will. Amen.
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My sense of it is that our corporate confession is what Martin Luther might have called "right strawy" and that we might go to individual, personal confession anyway, in addition or instead of.
And that in any event corporate confession should be omitted during the Easter Season as almost blasphemously redundant to our theology of the Cross and Empty Tomb; and as a challenge and dare to our belief in that Cross and Empty Tomb thesis by facing it head-on instead of trying to empower it with our own liturgical actions.
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My other beef is that in Sunday worship we should say the Baptismal Covenant with its powerful promises about how we vow to live our lives in Jesus Christ; and put the Nicene Creed in the back of the BCP with the Athanasian Creed and other Historical Documents.
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Blogging this as a lenten exercise for today.
T90
lenten image pinched online sans permission - - if any complaints I'll take it down T+