Ash Wednesday Eve

 Ash Wednesday Eve 

Uncle Albert has begun this “gig” at church, I’m not sure why. “It’s a way,” he says, “of thinking about things.” Lectio Divina. I looked up the term. It’s not a way of prayer, as I had thought, but of reading - though prayerfully. I should have known: lectio (a reading - aloud), lectionis, 3rd declension. The practice goes back, apparently, to a 12th-century Carthusian monk called Guigo (known to his Irish friends as “Little Topo Guigo”), who described and prescribed it.

     Uncle Albert’s group meets Tuesdays just before suppertime in the front of the sanctuary at St. Jude’s to read, to keep silence, to talk quietly in turns - or so I gather.

That’s all I gather, except that there’s a time-keeper, and a gong of some sort that marks the beginnings and ends of the silences. I can hear it from the church library, also the voices - but not what they’re saying - and the clank of the sanctuary radiator in the quiet times.

     I sit in the unheated library and read what I can find, not magazines like Uncle Albert reads at Dr. Feight’s, but books of sermons, books on prayer, histories, and commentaries on most books of the Bible. I don’t read according to any plan. Usually, I pick up one of the commentaries, open it up to wherever it opens up to, and start. Then, I just go until the last bell rings or until I get confused, turn the book over on my chest, close my eyes, and doze off. There’s one big chair one can doze off in.

Very rarely there is a magazine, left on the lamp table beside the big chair by someone not, I don’t think, a member of St. Jude’s. Crudely printed and illustrated on newsprint, digest-size, 16 or 32 pages, stapled along the spine. Sometimes it’s called Hidden Truth Revealed, sometimes The Revelator; but they are the same: the same bold and cranky typefaces, the same comic-book illustrations. Yesterday I read about how the Queen of Sheba came proposing to baffle Solomon, but instead, he baffled her. And how the eunuch in the service of the Candace became the great-great-great-grandfather of Haile Selassie. You can find it all, this conspiracy and its machinations if you know how to read Chronicles and Acts and the songs of Bob Marley. What the plot threatens I couldn’t be sure - that was the point at which I became confused - but it threatens something, and our way of faith is at stake.

     Who the we of “our” are wasn’t clear to me.

Afterwards, because yesterday was Shrove Tuesday, there was a pancake supper at the “cathedral,” All the Saints. And following the supper, there was a "burning of the palms," for which there is, there must be, a liturgy. If not Elohim, Uncle Albert said in the car on the way home, at least Haephestus must bless the lighter, the fluid, the bucket, the air that would blow the flame into light. Love would not keep him away.

 
We left the service while the palms were still burning in their holy bucket at the center of the labyrinth in the church courtyard, but taking the smell of them - reminiscent of marijuana - with us, already well-burrowed into my wool overcoat. Uncle Albert was wondering aloud about storage in Episcopal churches. The palms Father Tobias was burning were from only the previous Palm Sunday (eleven-and-a-half months ago), but the ashes made by burning them were not for this Ash Wednesday but the next, Ash Wednesday 2019. (The ashes for tomorrow morning’s service would be from the palms burnt Ash Wednesday Eve 2017.) So, where is all this sorted, labeled, stored, Uncle Albert pondered, the palms that had been kept from April 9th and the ashes kept from February 28th, 2017? Now, these ashes as well, to be kept for a year and a day? 

      Also, what happens to the ashes unused from one year to the next? Where are they kept? (Nils Sundstrøm claimed this morning at breakfast that there was a rite for their disposal held in each parish; then, they were gathered from throughout the diocese for the sake of the bishop's roses.)

On the way home in the car, Uncle Albert said that he was glad he’d grown up a true-blue Protestant: it gave perspective on these Anglican goings-on, he said. On the other hand, all the saints seemed to be enjoying Ash Wednesday Eve, in a spirit of Fat Tuesday taking none of it seriously at all. The dinner was sufficiently sumptuous, the pancakes good enough and a tableful of toppings. In the service, whether God stopped by or no, there was the exciting off-chance that their rector might catch fire as he added palms to the bright-burning bucket. And, one of our tablemates told us that she took her Palm Sunday palms home, for her cat. There was no toy Jinx enjoyed as much.

02.14.18