Christ has died.
Christ has risen
Christ will come again.

Alleluia! Alleluia! Alleluia!

Amen.

Yesterday, a little after two o'clock, I did as I do every year on Good Friday. I put my communion kit in the car, along with two heavy-duty ziploc bags and a garden trowel, and I headed out from my house to Ruthe's.

Every Wednesday when I am in town, I do the same thing, of course, because Ruth is house-bound in a wheel chair and I am the Lay Eucharistic Minister from our parish who takes the eucharist to her. Or that is how things were in the beginning, years ago. By now and after all these years of Wednesdays together, she is as near to me as any human being could ever be, short of marriage or kinship. We are friends at that subterranean level where channels flow quietly, watering both our souls.

So, other than the fact it was Friday instead of Wednesday, only two things were different about yesterday. The most obvious one is the business of my packing a trowel and plastic bags in with the normal eucharistic tools. The second is less obvious, but equally significant.

On Wednesdays, when I am to go to Ruthe for us to celebrate the mass together, I tend to show up sometime between three and three-thirty, depending on the load at my office and how many phones calls I can lay aside in order to leave for the day. On Good Friday, though, the timing must be as precise as it is random on other days of the year. On Good Friday, I have to be to Ruthe's in time for us to get her out onto the side deck of her house.

Charles, Ruthe's husband, built this small bit of quietness for her years ago. There's even a carefully pitched, sloping ramp so we can roll her chair down to the deck with minimum difficulty. And once we are there, we are no more than eight or ten inches off the ground itself, which is what matters. It matters because Ruthe's wheel chair, a plain yard chair for me, and a garden table-altar set for the eucharist have to all be in place by fifteen minutes before 3 o'clock. It is at fifteen minutes before 3 o'clock, at fifteen minutes before the ninth hour of the Roman day, at the quarter hour before the hour of His death, that we begin the words of the holy meal.

"The Lord be with you," I say.

"And also with you," Ruthe answers.

And so it was yesterday and so it will be for many ages to come. We moved through the words of the mass and through the sharing of the bread and wine. We said our closing prayers; and while Ruthe watched, I sat on the edge of the deck and began to dig a hole just where the front of the deck meets the edge of the walkway. It never has to be a big hole. That always surprises me, just as it did again yesterday. Such a small hole in the huge earth…six, eight inches deep and no more than another ten or so across.

I brush the earth from my hands and turn back to the altar-table. Its few vessels have to be wrapped back into place in my communion kit, and the linens folded away for some other time. Then I take out the sacks, and Ruthe sucks in her breath sharply, her eyes tearing just for a moment as she watches. I lift from the kit the small glass container that holds the reserved, consecrated wine and the little brass box that holds the reserved, consecrated wafers. It is the only physical access we have, she and I…the body and blood of Jesus…and we will not have even them for these three days. I put the wine in one bag, sealing it carefully against damage during the time of its burial. Then I do likewise with the coffer of bread.

While Ruthe watches, I set the blessed elements deep into the small hole, trowel the earth back over it, take up the flat rock Charles has set there for us, and then tamp it securely in place. As the rock bites into the new-turned ground and as the clock strikes three, I say the words. Every year and always the same. I say: "Jesus of Nazareth is dead." Then, saying no more words even of farewell, I roll Ruthe back up the ramp, and I leave. The only relief in our parting is that the trowel still sits waiting in the corner where the front of the deck intersects the line of the sidewalk.

So all is quiet in Lucy, Tennessee this sad day. My kit is empty, any communion impossible, lacking as I do, all the things necessary to effect it. And all will be quiet until tomorrow morning.

Tomorrow morning, God being willing, I will get up at six, dress in jeans, and head to Ruthe's. She will be waiting for me on the deck. If it is chilly, as I think it is going to be tomorrow, she will be wrapped in blankets; but she will be waiting, though she may not be alone. Sometimes, a neighbor or two will also be sitting there too, all of them silent in the early dusk.

There is no word spoken, no greeting, no exchange between or amongst us as we wait. We wait, of course, for first light. We wait for the dawning. And before the sun breaks the horizon, but just as the rose light signals its coming, I will pick up the trowel at last and begin to dig. As the sun breaks across the horizon, I will lift out the holy bread and wine, and say, "Christ is risen!" loudly enough for the whole world to hear me, should it be listening. And Ruthe, along with others who may have come, will in turn shout back, "He is risen indeed!" Then we will open our sacks and spread our feast, and feed one another in the promise of Easter and with the food of faith.

We will weep a bit, but not with bitter tears. No, these will be tears of joy and relief that this time of awful interruption is over for another year. And we will remember and tell each other about other Easters and sometimes even, when she has been feeling well enough to make them, we will share a warm hot-cross bun in Ruthe's kitchen before we scatter to our various families….

…but always - always - it goes with me. Always, in Easter memories, there lingers that haunting taste of this day--this Holy Saturday--when there is nothing.

May God have mercy on all our souls.

Now that's a very reasonable question, except that I can't exactly answer it, at least not in any straight-forward way. Much of the difficulty, I think, is that my answer, although it is very clear to me, is nonetheless not a very impressive one. That is, the Saying that most surprised me is one that I have known all my life and paid little or no attention to. Beyond that, it is only four words long and has absolutely no immediately apparent theological significance as such. To say the least, it would not convert souls or re-arrange doctrines, in the usual sense of those processes. It did, none the less, grab hold of me, as if I had never seen it before; and it also changed Jesus for me.

The Saying - it is Saying 57, Book IV - is spoken after Jesus has been on the cross for a few hours and is nearing death. Looking down from that place of torture, He sees His mother standing nearby, watching Him in extremis, and He says, "Woman, behold your son."

Always before, to the extent that I had thought about it at all, I thought what I had been taught to think, namely that He was saying to Mary something to the effect that she, as a widow who was about to lose her oldest male child as well, must now turn to the apostle John for protection and support. Now I don't think so.

It is true that immediately after speaking those words to Mary, He looks down upon those gathered beneath Him and says to John, "Behold your mother," as if He were consigning Mary to John's care….which, in fact, is pretty much what I think He was doing with John. I'm just not nearly so sure as once I was about the "Woman, behold your son," words.

There is a particularity, an intimacy, an intensity to His calling to her directly, and it rests in that word, "Woman." Woman. He does not address John by name, nor does He call Mary, "Mother." No. This is starker than that. And contrary to all the neatly sketched out conclusions I have heard in sermon after sermon about how perfectly lovely it was that even dying like that, Jesus could still be concerned about his mother, the truth is that what He actually says is not just stark. It is also singularly without affection. Woman, behold your son.

She had known from the beginning that it would come to this, or to something like this. From His conception there had been the prophetic knowledge that she was privy to, and an instrument of, something upon which time and space would both pivot. Even Jerusalem's most ancient and beloved priest, as he held her infant, had turned to her and said, "A sword will also pierce your soul." So she had known, and now she stood beneath His dying form feeling at last the sword of Simeon's prophecy.

But He tells her something else, something that is caught between the two of them in an intimacy beyond that of all the rest of human affairs. He is not saying, "Look at John now for help." Why ever would He say that to her? He is saying instead, "Look at Me."

Look at Me and understand, Woman, that your job is done. You have done it, and it is done….well done, Woman."

Just briefly, from that cross, God stops long enough to say to His creature, "You have done what was required."

It is finished.

"From now on, I will not talk much with you, for the ruler of this world is coming. He has no power over me; but I do as the Father has commanded me so that the world may know that I love the Father."

Jesus then said, "Arise, let us be on our way."

Saying 49, Book IV
THE WORDS OF JESUS - A GOSPEL OF THE SAYINGS OF OUR LORD

Tomorrow night, Christian around the world will commemorate the Last Supper, the final Passover meal that Jesus ate with His disciples in the Upper Room. At the commencing of that meal, we are told that he removed His outer garment, took a basin of water, and then washed and dried the feet of all His disciples in sign and symbol of how they--and we--are to be with one another. Taking up his outer garment again, He sat with them at table, instructing them, counseling them, preparing them for what the next few hours were to bring.

Then, taking the bread from the table, He broke it and gave it to them, saying the words: Take, Eat. This is my body broken for you. After that, taking up the cup, He gave it to them saying: This is my blood shed for you. Drink you all of it. After that, they left together for the Garden, where He would pray until such time as the betraying Judas and the Temple guards would come looking for Him, and the events of Black Friday would at last be set in motion.

Tomorrow at sundown, Christians will gather in their churches and holy places to read those words again. Some of them will also stop and wash one another's feet in re-enactment of what the Christ Himself did. All of them will observe the Lord's Supper together. Then, in stark silence, those serving at the altar will clear away the vessels that have held the wine and bread. They will take such bits and pieces of consecrated bread and wine as may be left and lock them out of both sight and reach in a niche or sanctuary in the chancel wall.

They will clear away next all the cloths and fair linen that have draped the altar, bringing basins of water to wash the altar down, as people watch, many of them crying. No part of the sacred meal may be left. All trace of it must be obliterated. The altar of God's presence is closed while all of Heaven and earth together mourn what is being recalled. Last, the priest or pastor extinguishes the sanctuary light or lamp. It will not burn again until the Easter Vigil when, just after midnight, the cry will go up: He is risen! He is risen indeed!

Between those two things--between the extinguishing of the Sanctuary lamp and the Easter cry of resurrection, there will be no music played in sacred space. There will be masses said, no weddings celebrated, no baptisms performed, no funerals conducted. The Church has lost her Lord to death, and she can neither be nor do without His sanctifying presence.

Friday, Christians will keep vigil, reading and praying both in their homes and, by rotation, in their sacred places. Many will gather with one another from noon on Friday until three o'clock in order to keep watch with Him during the last three hours of agony on the cross. By three o'clock, though, He has cried, "It is finished," and there will no more. There will be nothing. Nothing until the midnight which heralds the coming of Easter.

I will be here in this place with you as we enter the Triduum, but I will not speak then of Lenten things. Nor will I be able to say then, as I still can today, how much I have treasured this time with you and how deeply I have appreciated your comments and e-mails and notes. It is a good thing that we should have walked Lent's long weeks together, and I am grateful. I won't be talking here after the Triduum and Easter Sunday, obviously, but I hope you will join me from time to time at www.allthewordsofjesus.com . The commentary there, though hardly daily, concerns itself with the Sayings of Our Lord, just as the web-site's url suggests and--most important--everyone's contribution to the conversation can be heard and shared there.

What I want to do now is perhaps a presumption on my part. If it seems so to you, then I hope you will either forgive or just simply ignore me, as seems best to you. But for all practical purposes, today is the last day in Lent 2008 that is not more or less regimented by liturgical circumstances and considerations. And I can not bear to let it all go by without at least telling you what I thought, and still think, Lent is also about.

Imagine, if you will, that the time is the early 1980's and the scene is The Farm In Lucy where Sam and I are raising, children, cows, and mayhem in equal proportions. Imagine, and then come along with me:

Last night there was a storm…a cold front shifting suddenly and dropping onto us with ferocity and winds that bent down the pine trees along the fence line. Sometime after I went to bed, it tore open the pasture gate; so we awoke this morning to bitter cold and a scattered herd. Two pregnant heifers in the front yard, six more in the garden eating up what was left of the turnip greens, and seven others, mostly yearlings, playing at some kind of heifer tag in the windy orchard.

The mud from last month's snow was three inches thick. Even frozen, it came laughing up to suck off our boots. We slopped and fell and prodded swollen bellies until, ourselves covered with ooze, we fell onto the broken gate and laughed our laugh to the gray dawn skies and the startled blackbirds. We drove the last ones through finally, my son and I, and repaired the gate right enough, coming in out of the cold with feet so wet and frozen that we couldn't feel them and with our nightclothes covered in half-thawed manure. We stank up the kitchen with the good stench of late winter and of the earth when it is resisting one last cold front with the heat of coming fertility.

Later I stood at the spigot and washed the mud from our boots and felt again, as I do every year at this season, a grief for the passing cold. Looking across the pastures to the pond below, I knew it had indeed been the last storm before the spring, and I wanted to run backward toward the early morning, towards the winds and breaking limbs of last night.

"Lenzin" our German ancestors used to call this season, and since then we have called it "Lent." It is a time when Christians decorate stone churches with the sea's color and wrap their priests in the mollusk's purple. It was once a time when all things passed through the natural depression of seclusion, short food supplies, and inactivity, a time when body and land both rested. It is still, in the country, a final sanity before the absurd wastefulness of spring.

Each year at this time it is harder for me to desire butterflies and lilies, even to wish for resurrection. Each year I come a little closer to needing the dullness of the sky and the rarity of a single redheaded woodpecker knocking for grubs in my pine bark. Each year also I come a little closer to the single-mindedness of the drake who, muddy underside showing, waddles now across the ice to the cold center water to wash himself for his mate, all in the hope of ducklings later on.

Through the thin, sharp air I can hear the younger children in the barn. They are building tunnels again, making forts from the dried bales of hay. From the yapping I know that even the dogs can join in the intricacies which imagination has contrived. The five-year-old chases field mice as her brothers build. She will catch another soon and drown it in the water trough with unsullied sadism, feeling only the accomplishment that comes from having helped to keep her part of the world in balance.

In the summer, the mice will leave, going back to the fields again, and she will take to pulling everything that blooms instead, bringing them all to me indiscriminately. The tin-roofed barn will be stifling, and the forts will have all been eaten. The boys will be picking beans and complaining of the itch from the okra leaves, being themselves too hot and tired to desire anything except nightfall and bed. The drake will have a family, which he will abandon to the mate he so much desires now, and the woodpecker's carmine head will burn to tired tan. The farm in the summer becomes like the city is all year…too much color, too much noise, too much growing, too much hurry to stave off loss and destruction, too little natural death and gentle ending, too little time for play, too little pointless imagination.

I can remember many summers now; it is the singular advantage of years that one can do so. And I remember that once summer comes, I spend it wallowing in the easiness of it; the excess of its fruits and vegetables, the companionship of its constant sounds as the hum of insects and Rototillers gives way in the evening to the croaking of the frogs and the raucousness of the katydids. I remember also that I begin early, in that green time of summer, to dread the stillness of the coming cold; to fear the weariness of winter menus, the bitterness of breaking open pond water for thirsty cattle and of packing lunches--interminable lunches--for reluctant children on their way to school.

But for right now it is Lent, and for one more snow I can luxuriate in the isolation of the cold, attend laconically to who I am and what I value and why I'm here. Religion has always kept earth time. Liturgy only gives sanction to what the heart already knows.

As the fifteenth child in a family of sixteen, he had understood from the beginning that while he might expect some financial help from his family, he had best be prepared to hustle the lion's share of the requisite funds for himself. Accordingly and by his own admission, he went looking early in life for something he could do that was both lucrative and still flexible enough to not interfere with class schedules and academic calendars. At what exact point he figured out that music was the answer, I never knew; but he did. I never knew, either, how old he was when he determined that he needed to know how to play a piano and, having so decided, managed to earn lessons for himself by yard work and fast talking, but he did.

I don't think the result would ever have been regarded by an accomplished professor of piano as being of concert quality, which was all right. All my father wanted to do--at least originally--was play piano bar well enough to take in significant tips in the speak-easys and honky-tonks. But because Sunday was also a free day academically and because he was going to be in church anyway, he also wanted to be skilled enough to hire out as the pianist for a decent-sized church in the urban areas where universities are normally located. He succeeded in both venues, never apparently remarking, even to himself, upon the dichotomy between honky-tonk all night on Saturday and the chancel all morning on Sunday. What mattered to him was that it worked and allowed him the funds with which to do his real work.

Over the years, of course, he ceased to play publicly. First, in the bars, for reasons of reputation and professional politics. Then, in church, for as a devout Presbyterian, he wanted to worship within his own communion. And then too, as a persuaded Christian, he spent all the Sunday mornings of his full adulthood, not playing the piano, but teaching Adult Sunday School, serving as church elder, and frequently performing as the guest preacher somewhere or other. The result was that by the time I came along, all of his piano playing was for Mother and me….and then, increasingly, for me.

It broke his heart that I had no ability at all for playing or even for singing; but his heart was somewhat repaired by the fact that I loved passionately to hear him play, especially when he would play the old hymns of his earlier career and would sing the words as he played. He was a tall man--6 feet, 4 inches--and his voice was in proportion to his size. I can remember when, at about six and a half, I perceived for the first time that I could "feel" his voice as well as hear it.

But the years rolled on, and by the time I was ten or so, he had developed arthritis. I don't think it ever pained him in the way that that disease process pains many people, but it did cripple his hands beyond any hope of music-making. He would sit at the piano, rub his hands together and then one with the other, shake them, and then try; but he would miss the notes or slur a timing or simply not be able to strike a chord powerfully enough. The loss was more painful to him than arthritis itself could ever physically have been.

Yet to the end, there was one hymn or song he would not give up. Mangled or not, less than perfectly delivered or not, he always played it, every Christmas and every Easter. He played it and he sang it and he rejoiced in it. All of Holy Week, he played it until I, tone-deaf and musically inept as I was, could even sing it with joy. It was "The Holy City" by Frederick E Weatherly and Stephen Adams.

"The Holy City" was originally written and scored by Weatherly and Adams in 1893, and one does not hear it sung much anymore, if ever. What it meant to my father's generation, I shall never know, of course, other than to know that it was very important culturally as religiously. James Joyce, for instance, even uses it in Ulysses as well as again in another fragment, Stephen Hero. For me, its importance is my father, obviously, and the dear way of the song's coming into me. Entering Holy Week without "The Holy City" is an impossibility for me. It's just that simple. But there is one other reason for my re-printing it here.

Yesterday, I wrote about my great admiration for, and rejoicing delight in, N. T. Wright's volume, Surprised by Hope. It is not lost on me, however, that the grandeur underlying the lyrics of "The Holy City" is the grandeur underlying at least part of Bishop Wright's theology. May we all find joy in both.

THE HOLY CITY

Last night I lay asleeping.
There came a dream so fair.
I stood in old Jerusalem
Beside the Temple there.
I heard the children singing
And ever as they sang,
Me thought the voice of angels
From heaven in answer rang:
Jerusalem, Jerusalem!
Lift up your gates and sing
Hosanna in the highest
Hosanna to you King!

And then me thought my dream was changed.
The streets no longer rang.
Hushed were the glad hosannas
The little children sang.
The sun grew dark with mystery,
The moon was cold and chill
As the shadow of a cross arose
Upon a lonely hill.
Jerusalem, Jerusalem,
Jerusalem, Jerusalem,
Hark how the angels sing!
Hosanna in the highest!
Hosanna to your King.!

And then methought my dream was changed.
New earth there seemed to be.
I saw the Holy City beside the tideless sea.
The light of God was on its streets.
The gates were open wide,
And all who would might enter
And no one was denied.
No need of moon or stars by night
Or sun to shine by day.
It was the new Jerusalem
That would not pass away.
It was the new Jerusalem
That would not pass away.
Jerusalem, Jerusalem!
Sing for your night is over!
Hosanna in the highest,
Hosanna forever more!
Hosanna in the highest,
Hosanna forever more!

Such talk as this has not been much engaged in of late, of course. Understandably, there's a certain squeamishness on the part of many Christians when we are forced to get down to the brass tacks of what we believe. Some--many, perhaps--of the fundamental elements of basic Christian thought are as susceptible to ridicule as they are hard to defend with logic. Moreover, we live in a christianized culture where one can function quite easily and fully without ever having to parade the defining particularities of one's faith around for all to see. In truth, a lot of us out-right cringe at those Christians who do insist on over-much public display and parading of doctrinal positions. And then there is always the unfortunate fact that talk of end-times and second comings has been conducted, for the last forty years in this country anyway, not with dignity and prayer among the faithful so much as in popular books best known for their horrors and their ability to chill and thrill.

I'm not sure of the rules of blogging…or even if there are any operative rules at all. But I am reasonably sure that most folks who bother to read a blog would prefer for it to contain content itself rather than refer to content that is located elsewhere. By and large, I think that's a pretty good and fair principle, if not a rule; so I try to adhere to it…but just not today. Today I want to talk about content to be found off-site and elsewhere. Today I want to talk about a book.

Talking about books is what I used to do for a living, more or less. It is certainly something I still do a lot of in conversation and lectures. But rarely, if ever, in all these many years of talking and writing about books, have I found myself so stunned and so persuaded by a book that I hesitate even to discuss it, lest I err by omission or, by some misstep, deter another from reading for him or her self. Surprised by Hope by N. T. Wright, however, is such a book.

Released in this country in conjunction with Lent, Easter, and the Great Fifty Days that follow, Surprised by Hope is a crystal-clear, powerful course-correction for all of us--Christian or otherwise--who think that eternity is somewhere "over there" or "in the sweet by-and-by." It is a sobering call for Christians to return to the basic operating principle of a redeemed creation whose redemption began on Easter, is presently in process, and will be completed with the final Triumphal Entry. It is also somewhere between a death knell and an impediment to a whole lot of 19th and 20th century conversation about how life for the faithful is only a matter of journeying to somewhere else through a vale of tears and temptations that are to be passively endured.

In other words, and in my opinion, if you want to know what Easter is about, get yourself a copy of Surprised by Hope and hunker down for the read of a lifetime....literally.

I began life as a poet. Or more accurately, I began life as a lover of poetry, primarily of its music more than of its truth. My father had the most sonorous of voices, and his rendering of the 19th and early 20th century English poets was as filled with splendor and wonderment as ever any poetry was. So perhaps I fell in love with poetry because I was more than a little in love with my father and his golden, well-tutored voice. I honestly don't know about that, but I do know that I began my writing life, hoping to be a writer of poetry, of the kind my father could and would read aloud.

I never achieved that goal, but I have over the years recorded my own seasons in the medium of poetry, despite the fact that is and was in large part closed to me. In particular, when I come to this day in the Church's year, when I come to the distracting raucousness of tomorrow and the dead, sterile dreariness of next Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday, I pull out and read again what once I wrote about them. Here, then, are the words that finally captured, for me anyway, this last few, weary days of Lent.

LENT'S LAST DAYS
St. Anne's Parish - Lucy, TN - 1981

We must think now
in this time of a dying winter.
We must stop
and we must consider-
what is this sleep
we fear to enter?
We must think now
and we must consider
what it is
that we must consider
while the wind still sweeps
the gutters and the streets
now in this time of an ending winter.
When the mind sleeps,
the spirit wearies and grows bitter.
We must stop now
and consider
before the lilies rise,
why the god denies
an easy sleep.
We must stop now
And we must consider
what it is that can be lost to us
if the will should blanch and wither
now
in this time of a dying winter.

Phyllis Tickle
-----

Obviously, as a female, I was supposed to produce children, including going through all the procedures necessary for doing that job legally and responsibly. (God knows, with seven children in our fifty-two years of marriage, Sam and I can check that one off the list as fully done.)

Then I thought as well that I was supposed to belong to some group or institution or profession to which I could contribute and from which I would receive some overt, demonstrable acknowledgement that I had lived, worked and, of course, produced. I suppose I did that, too, at least in so far as teaching and writing and the Church are professions and institutions. And I have loved it all. Heavens, I still love it all. But I don't think I am because of any of it, or in terms of any of it, or even for the sake of any of it.

I should have known better right from the start, of course, despite the work ethic and the culturally-endorsed glories of individualism. I was reared Presbyterian, and I certainly was taught better.

I laugh now and say that I got over being Presbyterian when I was seventeen; and that is true. The first thing I did when my mother left me as an entering freshman in my new dorm room was to go straight to the student co-op and buy a pack of cigarettes. The second thing I did was to betake myself to the first Episcopal Church I could find and ask for instruction in whatever it took to learn to worship God that way.

I gave up the smoking years ago, but I have never looked back on the Anglicanism part. Yet even so, there are some things about Presbyterianism and those first seventeen years of being one that I am adamantly, sometimes even tearfully, grateful for, not the least of them being some sections of The Westminster Confession.

The Westminster Confession, Presbyterianism's great statement of faith and doctrine, opens with the question: What is the chief end of man? It answers that question by saying: The chief end of man is to glorify God and enjoy Him forever.

How as a child and then as a young adult or, later, as a mature one, I could have failed to perceive what those words meant is beyond me. But better late than never…and no more fitting time than the closing days of Lent to admit that in the closing days of a lifetime, I think the old Westminster Confession had it right all along. For all the Lents and years left to me, pray God I shall live as one who does indeed know at last that our chief purpose is to glorify and enjoy Him forever. Even so, come, Lord Jesus.

I don't know when exactly it was that I became greedy of the years. I can remember, as every kid-turned-grown-up can, how I anticipated turning twenty-one; but that yearning was more for freedom than for advanced age. I can remember, after that, thinking for years that forty would be wonderful. Part of that anticipation was [and is] a gender thing in that biological existence gets a lot easier for women somewhere along in there.

After that, it was fifty I could hardly wait to arrive at. Again, I can remember that on the morning of my fiftieth birthday I was so off-the-wall with delight and excitement that even my kids thought I was bonkers. Sam would have thought so too, I suppose, had he not been the recipient of all my "I can hardly wait!" messages for the preceding three months.

Sixty-five is significant as well. At fifty, one feels--or I did anyway--as if life can now be lived more than accumulated. Most of what society demands by way of formal education, the expected mortgages and possessions, the requisite children, the identified skills and their employment…all of those things are either in place or as in place as they are ever going to be. Ahead of fifty stretches those wonderously rich years of being both as free as one will ever be of restrictions and also as able as one will ever be to do with what has been given. But sixty-five! Oh, my goodness, sixty-five is the time when most of us can begin to harvest part of our own crop, harvest and share and maybe even, if we are blessed, begin to seed out beyond ourselves with some of what we have been given and a bit, as well, of what we ourselves have mixed and matched.

But seventy-five…Did I mention that I will be seventy-five my next birthday?…Seventy-five is to be almost all the way up to the top of the mountain. Or more correctly said, it is to be as far up the mountain as one can go without walking straight in the low-lying clouds that cover the upper reaches of the mountain. To be seventy-five is to be almost there.

Seventy-five is being poised--exquisitely poised, even-- to enter and know the glory at last. Seventy-five is to say, "Take my hand, I'm coming in to rest a while," and know it is true. And seventy-five is also to say, out the whole sum of one's many, many years, "Thank You."

I will, by the way, be seventy-five on my next birthday, God being willing.

Lord, yes, there's a book idea out there that I have been wanting somebody to take on for years. In my head, it's entitled Bible Stories Your Mother Never Told You; and what it would be is a compilation, in story form, of all the Bible stories we buried in the 20th century because they weren't nice or, even worse, because they didn't fit the doctrinal standards of enlightened religion. I want somebody to re-tell, and then compile, the outre tales like Og of Bashan and his 13-foot-long bedstead, for he was the last of the giants that once roamed the earth and ruled the tribes of man.

I'd love to hear again the splendor of Melchizedek, mighty king of Salem, who had neither progeny nor forebears, but instead was, and who as priest of the Most High God blessed Abram and took from him the first tithe. I think we should remember and ponder again how it was that the Witch of Endor managed to conjure for King Saul the ghost of the prophet Samuel in order that the king might learn from the dead what his own future was to be.

I want to revel again in the scheme of Rahab, the prostitute, who was the first woman in recorded history to use a red light to mark her place of business…well, actually, it was a scarlet rope, and she hung it out her window to signal Joshua and the waiting Israelite army that it was safe for them to invade the city, but to please spare her home and family while they were doing it.

I want to be amused all over again by how the warrior Jephthah used a lisp to save Gilead. I love that wondrous tale of how he separated the infiltrating, but physically similar, Ephraimites from the true Hebrews in his camp by having each man say, "shibboleth." As it turns out, Ephraimities couldn't make that "sh" sound and could only say "sibboleth." Off with their heads!….over a lisp, no less.

Goodness, for that matter and while we are on Jephthah, I want to be confused and mystified all over again by his daughter and by her story. Especially in Lent, I want to feel again the poignancy of how she wandered the hills of Gilead for sixty days, dancing there with her handmaidens, dancing and mourning her virginity and preparing herself for what was to come. That is, she was preparing herself to be sacrificed by her father in fulfillment of a vow he had made to Yahweh. As with Iphigenia at Aulis, so with Jephthah's nameless daughter in Gilead. Both would die as sacrifices at the hand of a warrior-father. So horrific is that story that we are told the women for Israel for decades thereafter went up into the mountains for four days every year, making retreat there and mourning the fate of one of their own.

The list goes on, Jephthah's daughter being the one that cuts closest to Lent and what we are coming to as we approach Black Friday. But what matters here is not the titillation of lining up a whole battery of suppressed stories for the sake of their potential shock value. What matters is why they became, if not actively deleted from frequent telling, then at least ones to avoid because of the theological complexity they expose.

What matters is that those stories and three dozen others like them are the texture of religion. They are the nursery, the truth, and the hotbed out of which Judaism and Christianity come. They are the canonically established family stories of who we are; and without them, we are and forever will be bland strangers lost in concepts and theories, but lacking history and narrative insight.

What matters is that being observant Christian in a christianized culture is very difficult, especially if that culture has cleaned up your personnel file to fit its own sense of propriety and decorum.

What matters is that Lent is the time assigned for considering prayerfully how it is that we have allowed the world to make our religion too small.

Hilda was born in 614 c.e. in Northumbria, high up in north-east Britian. Because of her father’s untimely death, however, she was reared by her uncle, King Edwin. In 627, Edwin converted to Christianity and was baptized. So too was Hilda, along with the rest of the royal household. But in 633, Edwin was killed in battle, his crown passing eventually to a new monarch, Oswalt, who continued the policy of royal protection for Hilda. As a result, she lived in his household until 647, at which time she left to become a nun.

Almost from the moment of her final vows, Hilda’s life became one of ever greater prominence and influence in the Church. Among other things, she managed to found five different and successful monasteries before her death in 680. The last of them was Whitby, which was also far and away the most politically powerful and religiously gracious of them all.

Whitby was what is known as a “double house,” meaning that it incorporated both a convent for women and a friary for men under the administration of one principal, almost always an abbot. Hilda’s position as abbess of a double house like Whitby is, in fact, a powerful affirmation of what the ancient records say of her: namely, that she was brilliant, administratively gifted, wise beyond even her own extensive education, and respected by her enemies as well as her friends.

She was also deeply compassionate and enabling. Caedmon, the first of England’s great poets, was a stable boy at Whitby when, history says, Hilda found him, perceived his gifts and vocation, and then provided him with the sanctuary and means by which to do his real work as poet. But the problem in all this good news was that Hilda—indeed, all of those at Whitby—were Celtic Christians. Or to give them the name that their own time gave them, they were Ionian Christians.

The Celts had been christianized well before 300 c.e.; and as such, theirs were the culture and faith in which British Christianity had its deepest roots. But during the 5th and 6th centuries, frequent and ferocious invasions of Britain’s eastern and southern coasts by the Angles, Jutes, and Saxons had forced the native Celts farther and farther back into Wales and up into Ireland, and Scotland. Over the subsequent decades, as things had settled down into less bellicose ways and as the invading hordes had slowly turned into residential ones, the Celts had begun to send missionaries into the northern and western portions of Britain like Northumbria, those being the areas most contiguous with the lands of their own relocation. Rome and the Latin Church in Gaul, had also sent missionaries to evangelize the Germanic invaders; but those missionaries had stayed primarily in the south and east, those areas of Britain being the ones nearest to the continent and to the English Channel. By 647, the result was two Christianities in one, fairly-confined geography.

The differences between the two traditions were relatively few in number, actually. They differed culturally, certainly...that is, each tradition or stream of British Christianity differed from the other about where the seat of ecclesial authority was and about such seemingly inconsequential matters as the correct hair style for monks. They did differ, however, over one serious and central issue; they differed over Easter.

There is every reason to assume that the early Christians celebrated Easter on the Jewish Passover. Nisan is the first lunar month of the Jewish new year, and Passover is always observed on Nisan XIV as determined by a lunisolar calendar. By the end of the 3rd century, however, Christians had become persuaded that Easter must always be on a Sunday and, moreover, never on Nisan XIV. In 325 c.e., the Council of Nicea codified those two points, and turmoil had ensued. Several ways of calculating Easter’s proper date emerged, one method of calculation being adhered to in this part of Christendom, and another in that. Unfortunately, the method of calculation adhered to by Ionian Christianity permitted Easter to fall on Nisan XIV, if that day were also a Sunday. And Hilda was Ionian, deeply Ionian, in fact. So too was Oswiu, king of Northumbria in the late 650’s and 660’s.

The king may have been devoutly Ionian, but unfortunately his queen, Queen Eanfled, was a Roman Christian. They apparently got on well in most things; but about the proper dating of Easter their differences were sharp and distinctly disruptive of the royal tranquility. While the king’s faction might be celebrating Easter, the Queen’s faction could still be fasting for Lent, and vice versa. Things went from bad to worse, as such things tend to do. Finally, in 664, things came to a head, and Hilda stepped into the breach.

The now famous Synod of Whitby was convened that year with Hilda serving as host to all the clerical and political dignitaries who gathered there to resolve the issue. The determination to be made was not, of course, just about the date of Easter, though that was the overt reason. What really was at stake was whether Britain—and all of us who have descended from her—would be Roman or Ionian in their Christianity. King Oswiu served as both moderator and judge of the procedures. Bishops from both sides of the aisle made their case before him; but here histories of the proceedings differ.

Some say that King Oswiu, when the arguments were at last all presented, asked each advocate one question: Was Peter really given the keys of the kingdom and declared to be the rock upon which the Church was founded? When all those on both sides said yes, then the King is said, by some, to have ruled in favor of Roman Christianity for England.

The Veneable Bede, on the other hand, tells the story a bit differently, saying that it was Hilda herself who cast the determining vote. According to Bede, it was an act of enormous self-sacrifice for that strong woman—whom, he says, all referred to as “Mother,” so great was her wisdom and power—to do so. But by voting against her own heritage, Hilda unified Britain, enabling the presence of one faith common to both the Celts, who were her people, and the Romanized Anglo-Saxons to the south and west of Northumbria.

Regardless of whether one says Hilda’s role was only that of facilitator of the Synod of Whitby or that it was, instead, the larger one of tie-breaker, the stories all agree about one thing. To this very day, every time sea gulls fly over the site where Whitby once stood, they dip their wings in tribute to the woman who governed there and who, by one means or another, saw to it that our Easters would always fall on a Sunday.

There are familial reasons for my feeling so inclined. My maternal grandfather was what used to be called a “turn-around man.” He worked for companies—and eventually for himself—that bought hotels that were on the downside of the curve, refurbished, re-staffed, and re-invigorated them back into profitability, and then moved on to the next ailing hostelry. As a result, my mother spent a good many of her formative years running around hotel penthouses and being baby-sat by superb chefs who let her watch so long as she would sit quietly on a nearby counter. The result was that she was herself a superb chef, untroubled by having three or four dozen guests in at any one time. She was also restive…faintly, but consistently. I inherited the latter, but unfortunately entirely missed the former. The restiveness has served me well, though; or at least it has made my roving life a familiar and comfortable way of being.

But things being as things are, and given my somewhat peripatetic life as a public lecturer, my hotel life is in seriatum, rather than a matter of hunkering down in any one place for more that three or four days. The flip side of constantly re-locating from hotel to hotel is, of course, that each time I leave one hotel, I go to another very similar, although ostensibly different one. It’s the leaving, though, that I always remember.

Going in, most up-scale hotel rooms really are very like unto one another. The windows are large, with curtains as well as drapes. There is a desk with the requisite number of plug-ins. The electric clock is equally unprogrammable in all of them, and the television is always hidden in a cupboard as if it were somehow ashamed of itself. Given their almost bland similarity, one to another, I scarcely notice any particular part of any one of those rooms as I unpack. It is afterward, when I am notice.

After two or three nights in a place, after bathing there and sleeping there and reading and writing there, my immediate memories are tethered there, caught on one piece of furniture or another, or on one view or another, or on one unusually comfortable chair or another.

Then the time comes to move on. I pack up all the bits and pieces of me that are scattered about. I check the drawers, the closet, the bathroom to be sure everything is back in my suitcase. And then, standing in the doorway, suitcase beside me, I look back, every single time, at the room I am leaving, and I am overwhelmed, every single time, by how little that room cares…by how it could possible be that I have made no impression at all on that space. Once housekeeping has carried out my trash and bookkeeping has run my credit card for the last time, I and this place will no longer have any connection with one another, as far as it is concerned. And standing in that doorway, looking back into that room, I experience all over again the bitter sweetness of human finitude.

But time….ahhh, therein lies our final frontier, the proof of our limitedness, the prison car whose forward thrust we can neither slow nor reverse. Escape it and we are other in a manner and of a substance we can not grasp, so alien are both to our experience and so encapsulated are we in time.

But today, on this day when once in every 365 days, we fancy ourselves capable of manipulating time by taking an hour from the earth’s courses, today I shall go to my prayers tutored by the sure knowledge that Lent is really about time and overwhelmed by the terrible beauty of that fact.