Spring Cleaning

We are once more rounding a corner on the Lenten road, and Holy Week is visible on the horizon.  Lent is meant to be a season of preparation for this week, this passion of our Lord.  And yet, even with the best intentions, the work is elusive.  I’ve been dutifully, and cheerfully following my Lenten practice of outdoor praying.  I’ve sat in the snow, and in the rain, and in thin early sunrise light.  I’ve prayed with Psalm 51:“create in me a clean heart.”  I’ve taken some personal inventory.  I’ve fervently wished for a clean heart.  It’s been lovely.  But I notice I am not necessarily drawing near to the cross.  I just can’t do it alone, I find.  I’m enough of an Anglican, an Episcopalian, that I simply cannot get to the Passion but through the pageantry and pattern of the Holy Week liturgies.  So, I can prepare simply by making sure my calendar is clear, and I am ready to attend those liturgies with a “clean heart.”  Here is a poem, a kind of invocation for Holy Week.  I can’t wait to begin it again!

 

Preparing for Holy Week

Why is Your story so hard to find?

It’s right there, on printed page.

Yet I cannot get there in my mind—

Actors loafing by an empty stage.

 

So every year, just once, again

We, together, attempt it to retell.

Forty days we’ve seen it coming, then

It’s time and we hope to remember it well.

 

That amidst music and patient sitting

With the drone of lectored words

Somehow you’ll find us, flitting

From thought to thought, unruly birds.

 

Somehow you’ll live again this week,

With your adversaries and your friends

In this moment when we seek

To live your story which never ends.

 

 

 

 

The Rev. Rita T. Powell