Letter from the Rector
Stories Around the Fire
This month of March finds us squarely in the midst of the Lenten journey. We have been marked with ash as a sign of our own mortality, have chanted and prayed about our own complicity in the sins of the world with the Great Litany, have encountered the Way of the Cross with Nat Lewis’ interpretation of the Stations in our Nave. Our second year of the Nets for Life campaign has started, with greeting cards, and small nets for coins for the children of the parish. Our individual practices have also begun to take shape. For some this involves a carbon fast, others re-connection with family, many with intentional time set aside for prayer and reading of the Holy Word.
Our time of reflection, meditation, acts of mercy and silence is leading us to the central expression of faith for Christians around the world, the Triduum, the three great days that are the heart of the Christian Holy Week. This ritual observance of the last days of Christ’s Passion has been walked by followers since at least the 4th century as our earliest documented experience of these liturgies comes to us from a 4th century Spanish nun named Egeria, who made a pilgrimage to Jerusalem to walk in the footsteps of Jesus and the disciples. The reasons why these liturgies are foundational for our practice are many. In my sermon for the first Sunday of Lent I reflected on the texts from Deuteronomy and the testing of Jesus in the desert as reminders for us, especially in the Season of Lent, of the necessity to know our story. Because what was true for the Israelites as they recovered the Law is just as true for us: if we are unaware of our story of faith, the personal and societal effects of this loss of narrative can be devastating.
It is for this reason that the Church has set aside the week leading up to our primary celebration of the Resurrection to live into these stories. Since few of us will physically walk the steps of the Via Dolorosa in Jerusalem this Holy Week, at All Souls, like in Christian churches throughout the world, we will be telling these stories, walking this path together. One of my favorite metaphors used to describe Holy Week is that of the campfire. Because at their heart, these stories are meant to be told, shared, re-created with the same intimacy and life that often happens when the stars are shining overhead and embers are radiating their heat. It is to be a time to come to know anew the stories which animate our lives and give us foundation and meaning.
Beginning with Palm Sunday’s gathering in the courtyard to remember Jesus’ triumphant entry into Jerusalem, through participation in Holy Week we have the opportunity to re-member, to put back together the disparate elements of our lives in the telling of our common story. From the footwashing and Eucharist of Maundy Thursday, to our time at the foot of the cross on Good Friday, and the sacred drama of the new fire, the darkness and light of the Vigil, we enter into the stories that shape our lives. May this Holy Week be a time for your re-membering, a time for us all to live into the stories that shape our lives.
Peace,
Phil+
