Hope for Lent
Tuesday, March 1, 2022
Augustus Edwin John, The Sisters (1937)
INVOCATION
Spirit, welcome. Clean our worried conscience with your whispers of love and light.
CLOUD OF WITNESS
When I think of Shrove Tuesday, I see Martha standing in her kitchen mixing a thin batter of eggs and flour for Jesus and his friends. I see her frustrated, holding the bowl while mixing and mixing and mixing.
With flour in her hair, I see her sighing heavily, so resentful of Mary who sits oblivious of her sister’s scorn. With all those men waiting for food and refreshment, I imagine Martha shaking her head, bewildered at her sister’s audacity to sit with the men as if she were one of them: It’s like she’s forgotten she is a woman, same as me, she thinks. It’s like she thinks she can just up and go and do, forgetting that she was made to help me here in the kitchen.
Martha can’t believe she’s expected to carry the burden of being about the business of housekeeping and hospitality all by herself. Resentment rises and erases her. She’s abandoned to the emptiest parts of herself where only Darkness is warmed by her seething.
On this Ash Wednesday, I think of Martha mixing and pacing and muttering beneath her breath, until final she has her say with Jesus: Don’t you think, Jesus… Can you help, Jesus…Honestly, Jesus, remind her that she is a woman, not a man….
And I think of Jesus sighing sweetly, “Oh, Martha, there are no women or men here. There’s only you and me and us and God and all God’s children. Mix the batter or don’t mix the batter, Martha. You will not find yourself in the bottom of that bowl no matter how vigorously you stir and stir and stir. You are not this woman. Mary is not that woman. You are this heart right here, and over there sits the heart of Mary. Both hearts are beautiful, worthy, forgiven and welcomed.”
CALL & RESPONSE
Call
All will be well and all will be well
Response
And every kind of thing shall be well
CANTICLE
The Journey by Mary Oliver
One day you finally knew
what you had to do, and began,
though the voices around you
kept shouting
their bad advice —
though the whole house
began to tremble
and you felt the old tug
at your ankles.
“Mend my life!”
each voice cried.
But you didn’t stop.
You knew what you had to do,
though the wind pried
with its stiff fingers
at the very foundations,
though their melancholy
was terrible.
It was already late
enough, and a wild night,
and the road full of fallen
branches and stones.
But little by little,
as you left their voice behind,
the stars began to burn
through the sheets of clouds,
and there was a new voice
which you slowly
recognized as your own,
that kept you company
as you strode deeper and deeper
into the world,
determined to do
the only thing you could do —
determined to save
the only life that you could save.
And every kind of thing shall be well. <3
🔥 🔥 🔥