February 11, 2008
Sackcloth
It’s sackcloth and ashes time. Canon Quirk called and said he went churching yesterday morning hoping to hear again about Jesus’s First-Sunday-in-Lent temptations and for counsel what he might do about his.
Instead, he got another travelogue. The preacher is one of those who has been around a lot to holy places and apparently can’t wait to remind us that he’s been where Jesus or somebody has also and what it’s like. This time, he was candid enough to say he didn’t walk around the same wilderness for anything like forty days and nights and that he never met the devil at all. I asked whether he said he thought he could turn stones into bread. Quirk said that never came up, just left the congregation wondering how he might have answered if asked.
I was surprised at Quirk’s call. He usually has nothing but disdain for those who get all holier-than-thou seasonally and then return to their nefarious ways on the in-between Sundays, then hang it all up on Holy Saturday afternoon. When I remind him Lent is at least an oversized tithe of the year, and that’s better than nothing, he never seems all that convinced
If Lent affects anything for me, it at least gets at my conscience. I shared parish boundaries with a younger presbyter colleague some years ago who every Lent fasted on Wednesdays and Fridays and got me to doing the same. I was never all that comfortable with it, but was inspired by him and his abundant spiritual energy, whatever that might be. I wonder now that he’s a lot older whether he’s still into this sort of thing. I’m not.
Being Lent, I looked up “conscience” in one of my favorite word-crutch books only to find the entry referred me directly to “remorse.” Turning there, I read enough to discover that remorse comes from a word meaning to bite again and suggests that maybe one’s conscience is something that gnaws inside. I already knew that, so when it also said there may be an earlier Latin connection of mors = bite with mors = death, I decided that was enough, Quirk’s provocation to the contrary.
It’s too early and too cold for Lent, anyhow. Even our Lenten roses are dormant. I’m following their lead.
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