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Hallo again to all. It is impossible today to write about anything but the American epidemics of gun violence and mental illness. It is impossible today to write about anything but global cultures of active toleration toward the mistreatment of women. It is impossible today to write about anything but the ongoing nuclear tensions on the Korean peninsula. It is impossible today to write about anything but the landmark installation of a woman as an archbishop in Australia. Our words today would be inadequate to each of these emerging occasions, as we reflected this morning during the Great Litany in procession for the first Sunday in Lent. Each petition for mercy and deliverance seemed apt in its encompassing way: carrying our woes on prayer and foot in a form given us for this season by the Church in old wisdom. Although our parish life does not involve the use of Cranmer's Litany more than a few times in the year, there is never a day when its petitions are not true:
In their steady cadence, the words washed over us this morning with a clarity we haven't known before. Each line is a reorienting of our hearts to turning and repentance, asking God to hear the sincerity of the praying Church in our wish to be more conformed to the mind of Christ and the needs of the world. The Litany is no panacea—it would be idolatrous against the events of this young year to suggest so—but it is at the least a common expression of our intention to change with the good help of a good God and our neighbours. We went in our souls' eyes this morning during the Litany not to a cathedral close or even to the Green and Pleasant Land, but to the utter desolation of the first Lent: the imprisonment of John at Machaerus by the Dead Sea, the temptation of our Lord in the wilderness, the utter stillness and thinness of the mountain fortress of Herod where we hiked and sang and prayed in October. The site of Salome's request and the horrible beheading, this place provides no comfort. Its history has purged it of joy, and it is tended by a solitary Coptic refugee at a bus stop. One is left with one's words, one's body, one's eyes—the ability to walk and to pray, but an utter reliance on the mercy of God for sustenance and safety. Even in a modern tour group, this is not an illusion: imprisonment in such a place is almost natural, and fasting nearly inevitable. Was the Baptizer any more a prisoner in the mountain fastness than Herod? In the surgical precision of Litany, are any of us exempt from the world's imprisonments of sin, error, selfishness, failure? We start the journey of Lent with the Litany, mindful of the manifest brokennesses we all know, but giving them—all of them—to the God who will in 40 days kill death with Love stronger than death. As we put each foot in front of the other, we acknowledge our duty to be a people who change: who change our hearts, who change our workplaces, who change our families, who change our governments, who change our parishes, who change wrong structures, who change through grace all that is not strong and brave and yielded. If the wilderness is clear to see, so are the guiding lamps that pierce it word by word, and action by action. See you next week. Good Lord, deliver us.
Richard Mammana and | ||
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