[ hold :: this space ]

Kylie Crabbe - whose theology and writing is always rich and wonderful -  has a really good article in Eureka Street about Ash Wednesday (online here). [To understand the article you need to know that on Ash Wednesday in 1983, South Australia and Victoria had devastating bushfires which took many lives and destroyed homes and property. They became known as the Ash Wednesday bushfires. The day left a massive scar on many communities that's still present.]

I loved this last paragraph:

“…Lent happens every year, and it is always followed by the celebration of renewal at Easter. In any given year, when for whatever reasons people find themselves unable to believe it, they are still invited forward, to wear the ash, name the brokenness, and be carried by the millennia of the faith of others, until they find that the renewal has become their own.”

It’s not quite signed off yet, but it’s a thousand times more likely than it seemed on Tuesday… I’m confident enough that we will have access to the basement carpark for Easter Saturday to be able to do some serious planning.

[i first posted about this last week: the idea is to do a sacred space / installation thing on Easter Saturday in the basement carpark at our office in the centre of melbourne]

If you’ve been lurking, wondering whether you’d like to participate, now’s your moment to let me know. we’re making a time to get together and sketch it all out next week. please don’t think you’re not talented, creative or imaginative enough to be part of this… if i let that instinct win each time it tries, i wouldn’t leave the house each morning.

[If you think you've already indicated your interest to me - especially if you did that by email - and you didn't get the email i just sent, can you let me know? Our work email and internet has been woeful for the last few weeks and emails that i was sent a couple of weeks ago are still coming through at random moments. Emails being sent now are coming through fine - so if i'm not replying now it's just because i'm rude.]

There are a group of us having dinner tonight in St Kilda to start dreaming about what alternative worship / sacred space stuff might be possible down that side of the city. There’s always space for more people in such conversations. let me know if you want to be involved.

We’re still negotiating with Melbourne City Council and the synod office about using the basement carpark on easter saturday. bureaucracy sucks. I’m still quite hopeful it will happen. Any security guards we have to employ can be part of an installation.

I’m doing an Ash Wednesday sacred space in the chapel for the people who work at my office next week. It’s an open all day, drop in when you want, unstaffed kind of event, so it will need to revolve around stations [last year i did this labyrinth].

This was the first thing that i wrote yesterday for it, but i don’t think i’ll use it. I think i’m going to pick up more on the ashes theme than the wilderness theme. And i want to use less words. The end’s not right, either. in fact i’m not sure why i’m putting it up here…

Maybe the wilderness you’re facing is your own.

You’re not here by any act of faith
- at least, not of your choosing.
The wilderness just grew around you
until everywhere you looked
it was.

And if the purpose of entering this wilderness, this journey of lent,
is to be stripped back to nothing,
you have already arrived at its destination,

left only with uncertainty
and disillusionment
and the cold ashes of dreams that once burnt fierce
with faith’s passion.

So you stand here at the edge of your wilderness
your desert landscape
your concrete rubble

to wander here, your 40 days…

thinking about Ash Wednesday and Lent today. i love this season. i did a spotlight search on my computer for ‘black’ (just wondering what inspiration is lurking in the subconscious memory of my computer) and this came up. I wrote it a couple of years ago when i was writing for Seasons of the Spirit Christian Education curriculum. I used to write the material for 15-18 year olds - this was a week that focussed on lament.

[i should have said, when i put this up yesterday, that one of the great things about the Seasons curriculum is its use of art. The material for each season includes posters of different artworks which are then used throughout the curriculum. One of the pieces for this particular season was Kandinsky's Composition VII... which makes a bit more sense of the reflection...]

They say black is the colour of death

Are they colour blind?
I drown in a sea of red rage in the moment I remember you died
I sink into green when I just can’t forget.

The scream that catches in my throat is coloured magenta, but when it
fades to sobbing, it’s lavender… and sometimes,
just sometimes
I am surrounded by an aqua coloured calmness.

The exhaustion can only be pale yellow, the panic is crimson,
resignation is the exact shade of the mist that rises over the river just after sunrise

(don’t be seduced. It’s not as romantic as it looks.

It’s just nothingness)

I wish black were the colour of death.
Black goes with everything.
You can put it on every day and it always matches.
There’d be no need to colour co-ordinate. No need
to explain the ridiculous colour clashes
“Why did you ever imagine that the pink denial you’re wearing today
would go with that yellow hysteria?”

I wish I were a computer screen, that I could change from millions and millions of colours to black and white.

Instead, today, I’ll be living with the gaudyness and garishness of grief that refuses to be grayscale

or better yet, a watermark.

I was asked to write a devotion for the April edition of Network - the magazine produced by the Uniting Church for Adult Fellowships. They’ve given me permission to put it up here too:

April’s quite a month! It contains some of the most important celebrations in the life of the church – Lent, Palm Sunday, Holy Week, Good Friday, Easter Sunday… they can go by in a blur. Sometimes it can be hard to know whether we’re meant to be celebrating, grieving, overjoyed, overwhelmed…

The events of Lent and Easter help us to “practice” a story that’s made real every day – believing that God has experienced and knows the reality of pain, loneliness, despair and death… and that God will transform it into new life.

Today we will invite God into some of those places in our lives. Move around the following spaces - in any order - and enter again into the story of Lent and Easter.

1. Place a bowl of water onto a table.
    At the very beginning of this Lenten journey, we heard a story of how Jesus was baptised in the Jordan River.
    He heard the voice of God which said – even before he had done anything – ‘you are loved’. And out of that love, he knew his call to take love into the world.

    Run your fingers through the water. Remember, as you do so, that you are loved and called by God. Listen for where the voice of the Spirit is calling you to take love into the world….

2. Place some nails onto  a table, along with a piece of wood and a hammer.

    Jesus hung on the cross in the company of sinners.
    In the eyes of the people who wanted him to die, he was a sinner. He spoke the truth about love, relationships, the church, the world, God… and people weren’t willing to hear it.

Take the nail and hammer it into the wood.
 

3.    Lay out a length of black cloth and some black pens.
   
Easter Saturday holds the promise for us that there is no hell we can go to, where God hasn’t been before…
     Which means that God knows what it’s like to face the deepest sadness in life.

    Write them onto the cloth with the pen.
    No-one but God will be able to see what you have written… but know that it sits alongside the other stories of this community.

4. A length of white cloth (which can be easily ripped)
    When the women went to the garden on the Sunday morning to anoint Jesus’ body, they discovered that he wasn’t in the tomb. He wasn’t where they thought he would be.
    (People discovered that all through Jesus’ life, too – he was  never where people thought he would be!)

    Rip some of the white fabric, and take a piece with you.
    May it hold you to the faith that resurrection will happen
    … may you have the faith to believe it will happen in ways you don’t expect.

When people have finished, gather back together.

Pray: Loving God, may we always have the faith to recognise your story in ours, and help this community to offer it to the world, with love. Amen.
 

Show the 40 meditation, accompanied by the Dead Texan track (thanks to Craig for the music tip).

Have three spaces in the worship space for people to move to afterwards:

First space: rip out pages from an old Bible, put them on a table with a black marker and the following words:

    What are the parts of the Bible you really don’t like?

            and pray that God will give you the courage to stretch it.

Second space: is just in front of the cross, with some pipe cleaners, a large wooden box, and the following words:

    What is the truth about God that you hold most tightly… the belief about God that you treasure most.

 
    Leave the space to discover something new about God.

Third space: Around the edges of the room, place printed out images from the ‘40′ series, in order (I was going to put them on top of newspapers - sort of a current context kind of thing!).  Spread out the following questions along the meditation (wherever they seem to fit!), along with markers and pencils for people to write responses onto the newspapers (you could put the images onto black fabric, and then have people respond by writing with black pen onto the fabric, for a more personal response)

    What’s your prayer for the beginning of this journey?

    What courage do you need to go into the wilderness? 

    What tangles you up in your faith?

    What are you hungriest for in life?

    What kind of saviour are you tempted to ask Jesus to be?

    What’s it like to look at a saviour who is like this?

    How does this saviour save you? 

the Grace Lent blog - a new reflection for each day of Lent

Pray-as-you-go daily Lent podcasts to download

Mark 1:9-15 

At that time Jesus came from Nazareth in Galilee and was baptized by John in the Jordan. As Jesus was coming up out of the water, he saw heaven being torn open and the Spirit descending on him like a dove. And a voice came from heaven: "You are my Son, whom I love; with you I am well pleased."
At once the Spirit sent him out into the desert, and he was in the desert forty days, being tempted by Satan. He was with the wild animals, and angels attended him.

After John was put in prison, Jesus went into Galilee, proclaiming the good news of God. "The time has come," he said. "The kingdom of God is near. Repent and believe the good news!"

Mark truly is the master of understatement.
in six verses:
a baptism
God’s voice and claim
the call of the Spirit
40 days in a desert
a few temptations
a visit from Satan, some wild animals, and a few angels
an update on an old friend
a trip to Galilee
and the promise of the kingdom

(which then fills the rest of the gospel)

Or is it an understatement?

Maybe he’s got it in the right perspective.
what would he say to a church that gets bogged down in theology about baptism, and membership, and who’s in and who’s out…

    or that angsts over times in the desert, which may simply be a fact of life
    (for Jesus and the church)

        which endlessly dissects the temptations of the world

            and endlessly discusses where the mission field is…

                and endlessly analyses the call of the Spirit…

                    and endlessly debates whether something is or isn’t the true voice of God…

and sometimes forgets that ‘the kingdom of God’ is actually the point of the gospel.

(and i’m not saying "the church", as in "all you others out there". I do this…)

I’m giving up the ‘endless discussions’ about the church for the period of Lent (I’m not sure whether that fits into Maggi’s definitions of Lenten disciplines, Lent’s really just an excuse to do what i know i need to do!). I’m breaking that discipline already tonight, because i have to go and present a report on this project to the Commission who funds it.

i’ll tell them about my Lenten discipline, and why i’m doing it… and i’m going to ask them not to analyse whether this project is good for the church, or whether it upholds the UCA theology, or whether we’ve been called by God as a commission to do this (all important questions, of course, but questions i can too easily answer). I want to simply ask how this project is or isn’t responding to the Jesus’ claim that the kingdom of God is near.

i hope i have the courage to hear. 

I find it bemusing, sometimes, how abruptly we turn from one season to another in the christian year. It was only two months ago that we were doing christmas, for heavens sake, and now we’re into lent!

Someone said to me once that we should always be able to layer our theology of one season onto another, that the songs we sing at Christmas should still make sense on Good Friday.

I’m going to use Si Smith’s meditation, 40 for a reflection at the beginning of a meeting this week. I  found the meditation through jonny’s worship tricks. I’ve dropped the images into iphoto and will do it as a slide show over music (the lovely thing about iphoto slideshows is that they adjust the time of the slides automatically to fit the length of the music. A mac can make even me look technically adept).

I was playing it over different music to see what worked, and by mistake, really, started playing Sufjan Stevens’ version of the christmas carol "O Come O Come Emmanuel". He has two versions of the song, one with words, one instrumental (one is on vol 1, the other on vol 3). You can download them, free, here. I’ll play them both, in that order. I know it sounds incongruous, but i just tried it, and it left me breathless. Who would have thought?

i’m making a labyrinth for Ash Wednesday. I’ll mark it out with rocks in the chapel, here in the synod office.

i started with the idea of having stations throughout the labyrinth, each with a bowl of ashes and a short reflection, but then decided (in my new policy of always removing something from the worship i curate) to strip it back, to guide the journey less… and it’s ended up simply with a reflection at the beginning, a bowl of ashes in the centre, and a reflection at the end.

it goes like this…

At the entry 

It was just a few weeks ago, really,
    that we were hanging fairylights and tinsel,
    unwrapping presents
    toasting Christmas with champagne
        and celebrating the Christ child born in the world.

it would be so easy to let that be the whole story of incarnation.

But today we can make a choice
    to face the reality of how this story of love, incarnate, continues.

Today is a turning point in this story -
    a day to recognise our humanity
    and our mortality

        to remember that only God is God,

            and to take a first step on the path towards Good Friday
            where Jesus shows us just how God is God.

As you walk this labyrinth,
leave behind the clutter and clamour of a world that would have us believe
there is another path to salvation,
    and let each footstep take you closer to the heart of God

When you reach the centre you may like to mark yourself with a sign of a cross
    to remember that we are dust and that to dust we will return
    and to commit yourself to walking this journey of lent.

at the exit
You leave here to go back into the world
where, at times, it seems everything conspires to distract us from this Lenten path.
    Some call it temptation
    but maybe that gives it a false romance.
The reality is, it’s just how life is.

As you go into the world
    make a space for lent to unfold

and if you give up chocolate, or meat, or driving, or talking about the church or theology
  - whatever it is that clutters your life with its false imperative and centrality -
have the courage to let the gap it leaves stay empty.

Because it does take courage to leave space for this story
  – uncompromising, stark, like the wilderness itself –
to take its hold on you

May you walk its path with faith this lent.
Know you walk it in the company of Jesus.