A Different Kind of List

Today is Ash Wednesday, the beginning of Lent. Many of us are contemplating beginning a Lenten discipline of some kind. Celeste has a long list -- she's at home with a baby, making art, and has already learned that without intentionality, the days fly by too fast. Diane has resolved -- well, her post is so good you should read it yourselves, especially the knitters! Cathy is Loving Life, Loving Lent, and Kathryn is learning to let herself be taken care of -- her post on RevGalBlogPals (scroll back to Tuesday) has much wisdom for all of us. All these plans have something in common -- being intentional about making a change. Without mindful intention, it's too easy to go on doing what we've always done, and not doing what we've always not done, and then wondering why nothing changes.

So what's my Lenten discipline going to be? I am doing one traditional "giving up" -- no computer solitaire! "Just one more game" too often turns into a late night, a book unread, a blog unblogged. There are better ways to spend my time.

More importantly, and far more difficult, I am going to be intentional about intercessory prayer, and do some thinking about how to do it.

Reading a blog, an email, a letter, or even the newspaper, it's easy to say "I'll keep you in my prayers." Too often in my case, those prayers are limited to the few seconds of silent prayer at church on Sunday. Even then, I tend to bring forward the two or three people who are uppermost in my mind and realize later that I've left out several more. Another time I pray is before falling asleep at night; in the quiet, it's easier to recall the people, but sleep too often cuts short the prayer time.

My plan in brief: to keep a written prayer list; to pray each day; to try using the prayer beads I made a few years ago; and to learn more about intercessory prayer.

Here are the prayer beads:
This part has symbols of several faiths, so be sure I can pray for you whether you are a Christian or not!

About the last part of the plan: I always have a feeling that it may be a little selfish just to be praying for specific people I know, when so many people I don't know may be in need of prayer for the same trouble. So quite often I will pray for "X and all others struggling with addiction," "Y and all others dealing with mental illness," and so on. I invite your thoughts on whether this is a useful practice.

May all who keep it have a blessed and fruitful Lent.

Friday Five: Time for Palms

Over at RevGalBlogPals, Mother Laura asks:

Can you believe Daylight Savings Time is here already? It's hard to get used to the new, earlier onset. My family has been getting up and out a little late and a little sleepy in the mornings.

And can you believe that in two days it will be Palm Sunday for Western Christians? Our Lent is almost over, while our Orthodox sisters and brothers, whose liturgical year follows the older Julian calendar, are just starting theirs. Nicholas did a recent book report on George Washington, and we were surprised to find out that our first President's birthday was originally Feb. 11, since he was born just before the change to the Gregorian calendar. Apparently the change almost caused rioting, as some indignant people were sure that they were being cheated out of eleven days of their lives!

(Mother Laura featured a music video of "Ride On, Ride On in Majesty" which is lovely, but this is still the song that I think of each Palm Sunday. In my one choir experience at the firehouse Sunday school, we sang this -- pretty ambitious for a bunch of fifth-graders!)

To help you adjust--and enjoy the process--here's a Friday Five about time and transitions....

1. If you could travel to any historical time period, which would it be, and why?
This is a hard one -- so many choices. And a lot would depend on where as well as when. But I think for my first time travel experience I'd want to go to New York City in the 1920s, in some capacity where I could hobnob with the early staff of The New Yorker.

2. What futuristic/science fiction development would you most like to see?
That's easy! Time travel!

3. Which do you enjoy more: remembering the past, or dreaming for the future?
Well, I certainly have more past than future at this point! And I do enjoy remembering, researching, reading and talking about the past. Yet, I still enjoy dreaming about the future. And of course, the future is as yet untainted by regrets and might-have-beens. So I'd have to say the latter.

4. What do you find most memorable about this year's Lent?
Once again, as three years ago, my church is undergoing transition and self-examination. (A different church this time.) With my former church, three years later all concerned are in a very good place. I hope and pray that will be the case here in three years, or even sooner.

5. How will you spend your time during this upcoming Holy Week? What part do you look forward to most?
We will have a Taize worship service on Thursday, and a Tenebrae service with special choir music on Friday. And of course Easter Sunday will be a big celebration. Of the three I think I most look forward to Thursday, at least I hope that it will be the deep experience of Maundy Thursdays past. I will miss, still, our old custom in City of Lakes of having a Holy Saturday breakfast and Bible study -- and not just because of the hot cross buns!

Even if you don't blog yourself, you can answer some or all of the above questions in a comment!

Friday Five: What Are You Doing for Lent?

Mother Laura at RevGalBlogPals says: Ready or not, Lent is upon us! [She then featured a Lenten song that's a favorite of hers, so I'm featuring one that's a favorite of mine here.]



1. Did you celebrate Mardi Gras and/or Ash Wednesday this week? How?
Well, not so much, as I mentioned in the previous post Slush Wednesday. I am still getting used to this new life of having only two humans in the household, and belonging to a big church with different rituals and expectations (same denomination, but many differences just the same). Home rituals seem odd with only two people, and most of my relatives here either are not Christians or are in non-Lent-observing traditions. This is something I'll have to keep working on.

2. What was your most memorable Mardi Gras/Ash Wednesday/Lent?
Having lived in the North most of my days, I've never celebrated Mardi Gras in context.
I suppose my most memorable Lent was the one when Cordeliaknits was born on the Wednesday before Easter (which I later discovered was called Spy Wednesday in some old traditions). Oddly, her birthday will not fall on Easter Sunday until long after I'm gone, but it does generally tend to fall during Spring Break for whatever school she's in. This should be her last Spring Break unless she ends up in academic chaplaincy, so there's a change coming for her!
Several years ago in my old church, the minister instituted something new for Ash Wednesday. Members were invited to submit general or specific people and other concerns to be prayed for during an Ash Wednesday litany. These were the most meaningful Ash Wednesday services I have ever known as we prayed for ourselves and each other and for the whole world.

3. Did you/your church/your family celebrate Lent as a child? If not, when and how did you discover it?
Not really, as far as I can recall. We heard our Catholic friends talk about Lenten fasting, giving up things for Lent, and so on. We did celebrate Maundy Thursday in the church where I was confirmed (on that evening, in fact) but I don't recall much else. In the first church I joined as an adult, we had Wednesday night soup suppers with a service and perhaps some mission component during Lent, and I still think of Lent as a time to think of others.

4. Are you more in the give-up camp, or the take-on camp, or somewhere in between?
More in the take-on camp, trying to have a more disciplined spiritual life.

5. How do you plan to keep Lent this year?
Primarily by reading and reflecting on the readings in Bread and Wine, the book chosen by RevGalBlogPals. I'll also make use of some other resources that I have or find. Just today when looking up Spy Wednesday to make sure I hadn't made it up, I came upon the Geranium Farm site -- coincidentally one of the principals of that site is the author of tomorrow's reading in Bread and Wine. So I'll be visiting that as well. In my "actual" (as opposed to "virtual") church, we are doing a study on Islam involving some lunches with videos and reading a novel about a Muslim American, and that ties in with something I often like to do during Lent, which is to learn more about another country or culture. (Probably fits in with all those Lenten soup suppers).
And today is Friday, and I will be making Salmon Wiggle* for supper. The Canadian Food Guide (I like it better than our Pyramid) says to eat fish twice a week, so I'm going to try that.

* How do you make a Salmon Wiggle? Tickle it under the gills! But seriously, folks, just open a can of salmon and take the skin and obvious bones out, give the juice to the cat or dog, and mash it up (the fish, not the cat or dog). Then make a white sauce like your Home Ec teacher taught you (don't forget to put on your hairnet!), add the salmon and some frozen peas, and serve over some form of starch. Usually it's toast at my house, sometimes potatoes, but today I am going to cast caution to the winds and by golly, I'm going to learn to make baking powder biscuits, or in fact, Bakewell Cream biscuits.

Slush Wednesday

Just back from my fourth walk of the day with Rusty. Earlier walks were quite wet and slushy; on this one, the slush was beginning to freeze but not, as yet, becoming too slippery. Anyway I have my Great Big Waterproof Boots to wear. They seem to weigh about 12 pounds apiece but that's probably not true.

No church for me today, I didn't want to walk all the way to Big Taupe Church, and I didn't want to trudge into the Episcopal Church in my clodhoppers. The only service at my church was at noontime, which suggests to me that the old New England Congregationalists here are not quite comfy with Ash Wednesday yet or at least don't think it's important for young families and children to participate.

I did read the readings for today from Bread and Wine, the book the RevGalBlogPals are reading for Lent. The general introduction talked about Lent as a time of joy, not the way many people think of it. The introduction for the first section was part of Oscar Wilde's The Ballad of Reading Gaol, where Wilde compares the heart broken by the consciousness of sin to the box of ointment that the woman in the Gospel uses to anoint Jesus. The reading for today was titled "Repentance" by Kathleen Norris, from her book Amazing Grace. She talks about reading the Psalms to parochial school students when she's being a poet-in-residence, and having them write their own psalms as not only an exercise in poetry, but a way to deal with their justifiable anger (for example, toward a sibling who mistreats them). Once they've got the anger out, they can begin the process of repentance. (And reconciliation?) If we think of the Psalms this way, it becomes a bit easier to take the parts where the Psalmist begs God to smite his enemies. I don't feel that we use the Psalms enough in church, and one of the reasons is probably a squeamishness about all that smiting! (Also there is almost an obsession in the mainline church with keeping the service to one hour in length. When this is used as a reason to truncate endless repetitious announcements, well and good; but I wouldn't mind staying a bit longer if we said or sang a Psalm every week, and maybe an extra hymn as well.)

Some years ago a friend told me this anecdote: An elderly man is asked whether he believes in infant baptism. His response: "Believe in it, hell! I've SEEN it!" I know people who say they don't believe in sin. And my response is, "Believe in it, hell! I've DONE it!" And it leads to a broken heart, or as the child in Kathleen Norris's piece puts it, a "messy house," but then it can also lead to the joy of repentance.