Ash Wednesday and the Journey to Jerusalem, again.
The middle portion of the Christian story begins, again, as many believers and practitioners of Christianity will recognize the beginning of Lent today, Ash Wednesday. Many will give something up as a way to identify with Jesus, but that is not my way. Rather, I encourage persons to add something to their life during Lent. Do something, add something that will remind that you are created in the image of the divine. There is some spark of the divine in you and all of creation. Find a way to participate in positive creation rather than creative destruction. My two disciplines this Lent will see odd. I’ll be reading, The Power of Parable: How Fiction by Jesus Became Fiction About Jesus. I’m also learning to roller blade. Yes, weather permitting, I’ll be out in my neighborhood or gliding through a cemetery without my cell phone for at least an hour. We are created to be both bodies in motion and to be still. I’ll be trying to do a little of both while I read and while I skate.
I’m beginning Ash Wednesday by turning to some words from Rev. Dr. Rowan Williams, former Archbishop of Canterbury. He offered these words and more in The Observer back in 2008. I find these words stirring and haunting to my practice of Christianity, for Christendom in general, and relevant to America’s current political “stuck-ness.” Here are a few paragraphs and a link.
We Live in a Culture of Blame — But There Is Another Way
Rev. Dr. William Rowan | March 23, 2008. . . the alarming thing is that anyone should think that the story of Jesus’ death is a story about the triumph of bad men over good ones – with the implication that if we’d been there we would have been on the side of the good ones.
It’s not only that the biblical story – especially St John’s Gospel – shows us just the mixed motives that can be seen in figures like Pilate and the High Priest.
Much more importantly, the entire message of the Bible on this point is that the problem begins with us, not them. Jesus is killed because people who think they are good are in fact trapped in self-deception and unable to get out of the groove of their self-justifying behaviour. And the New Testament invites every reader to recognise this in himself or herself.
Because we compete for the same goods and comforts, we need to sustain our competition with our rivals and maintain distance from them. But to stop this getting completely out of hand (‘the war of all against all’), we unite with our rivals to identify the cause of the scarcity that makes us compete against each other with some outside presence we can all agree to hate.
People may or may not grasp what is meant by the resolution that the Christian message offers. But at least it is possible that they will see the entire scheme as a structure within which they – we – can understand some of what most lethally imprisons us in our relationships, individual and collective. We may acquire a crucial tool for exposing the evasions on which our lives and our political systems are so often built. Click here to read more.