So Christmas came and went. It was meaningful, and intense, and helpful. I have not been back to church since Christmas eve, but I continue to rotate around the idea of practice and liturgy and how helpful it could or could not be to me and how I feel about the integrity of my concepts of god and not-god and the usual fascinating/boring/unanswerable/ineffable. I continue to swing between the intellectual purity of my Quakerism and the right-brain riot of Anglican liturgy, though swing is a strog word. I'm sort of just dangling there somewhere in the middle. The new year is well underway, and I have all sorts of exciting things happening in my exterior life. Aside from the occasional morning candle lighting and journal writing session, I haven't remained as purposeful about my interior life.
I am considering doing with Lent what I did with Advent, and perhaps taking up a discipline. Suddenly grand gestures like walking the Camino seem hugely attractive, which is usually a sign that I am running away from something. Even writing this post is running away in a small way because I ought to be doing some work. But ah.
I am interested in turning Lent inside out for myself. I have nursed a hatred for the season, for the story of the crucifixion and resurrection. Even once I dropped a literal belief in the substitutionary redemption idea I still thought it was a cruel and gory story and a disgusting myth. Some of that anger lingers. But I recognise in it the anger and disgust I have about the state of the world, about the existence of suffering, about my life-long inability to reconcile the Christian idea of embracing suffering or even the Buddhist idea of accepting suffering. I rage and rail and cry and pout and despair and flail my fists upon reality and it's all a bit messy and futile and embarassing. Still don't know what to do with it. But anyway. I have some guy-lines in my mind about all of this and how it may connect and the metaphorical truths in there but I need some way to lash it down to my experience or...something.
Thinking about thinking about all of this in a structured way for Lent, leaning into the gory metaphors of the Christian myth and seeing if they have something for me. I am of two minds about discipline or fasting...I would like to reclaim that too, because I know I have a very messed up relationship with it. Guilt, self-hatred, self-punishment, self-cruelty: those are all strong "demons" in my life, and I have done a lot of work to try to get out from under them. Self-acceptance and gentleness are hard-won. But still I struggle and want a better balance. At the moment I seem to have a foot in both camps: indulging myself and then yelling at myself for it later. Living without structure or discipline and then suffering the consequences. I'd like to make it better but never seem to gain any ground. With the disclaimer that I really am happy and healthy on almost any scale you care to use, this interior conflict is the most troublesome thing in my life. I am trying to approach it with fearless curiosity, but it is a challenge. Is this something that the scaffolding of a liturgical season could help me with?
I found a new-to-me Rilke poem today which I will carry around with me carefully.
I have many brothers in the South
who move, handsome in their vestments,
through cloister gardens.
The Madonnas they make are so human,
and I dream often of their Titians,
where God becomes an ardent flame.
But when I lean over the chasm of myself -
it seems
my God is dark
and like a web: a hundred roots
silently drinking.
This is the ferment I grow out of.
More I don't know, because my branches
rest in deep silence, stirred only by the wind.
~Rainer Maria Rilke, from The Book of a Monastic Life
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