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The
Bishop's Journal
March 2003
Journeys seen and unseen
Each year, sometime during the week between Christmas and New Year's, it is my job to set up the family calendar for the coming year. On the calendar we use, every member of the family has an individual box designated for each day of the year. It's a clever format that gives us a reasonably effective means of tracking our various coming and goings.
But before the New Year begins, it's my job to go through that calendar and mark out all of the special dates that we will need to be mindful of over the course of the next twelve months. They all get written down: the birthdays, anniversaries, and commitments for visits and appointments that were made several months ago. They get charted out first, and all of our subsequent notations--scribbled, scrawled and scratched--are made with reference to those of my neatly inscribed, post Christmas labours.
The church's liturgical calendar provides us with similar points of reference. Our lives, too, are ordered by the cycles of Advent, Christmas and Epiphany, Lent and Holy Week, Easter through Pentecost, and then by the long weeks of Ordinary Time. It's a wonderful gift that provides us with a special lens through which we experience the rhythms and movements of what constitutes the stuff of our everyday lives.
In her book Things Seen and Unseen, Nora Gallagher speaks of "living by a calendar that runs parallel to my Day-Timer: a counterweight, one time set against another. The church calendar calls into consciousness the existence of a world uninhabited by efficiency, a world filled with the excessiveness of saints, ashes, smoke, and fire; it fills my heart with both dread and hope. It tells of journeys and mysteries, things 'seen and unseen,' the world of the almost known.
It dreams impossibilities: a sea divided in two, five thousand fed by a loaf and two fishes, a man raised from the dead."
On March 5th of this year, Christians around the world will begin yet another Lenten journey. This annual walk from Ashes to Easter constitutes the heart of our common liturgical life. Through these forty days we will experience a shared passage into the dramatic core of the mystery of salvation.
We begin with Ash Wednesday's sobering reminder of our common mortality. "Remember that you are dust and to dust you shall return." Then it's off on a forty day pilgrimage through time and space. We'll visit Noah and Abraham; we'll walk in the wilderness with the children of Israel and receive the ten commandments with them. We'll traverse the Galilee with Jesus and his disciples; we'll see Jesus rage within the temple compound and listen as he challenges the unbelief of his own disciples.
And then it will be Holy Week--the hosannas of Palm Sunday, the chilling drama of Maundy Thursday and Good Friday, and finally the glorious and mystifying passage from crucifixion to resurrection. Alleluias ring forth once again!
Here we have a great many special days to mark on our calendars--or better yet--to mark with our lives.
May God grant you a blessed and restorative Lenten journey.
The Rev. Michael J. Pryse,
Bishop
