Fr.
Tony’s Letter to the Trinitarians
February
2015
Lenten
Journey
One of the services I love here
at Trinity is the Celtic Eucharist, held every third Sunday evening at 5
p.m. I enjoy learning through worship
about the saints, practices, traditions, and faith of the people of Ireland,
Wales, and Scotland. In January, we
learned about St. Ita of Killeedy, whose feast day is January 15. She had a vision or dream of nursing the Baby
Jesus, and wrote a lullaby for him. She
founded a school for orphans and was foster mother of many, including St.
Brendan. The St. Ita Cross, shown here,
is a Celtic knot with the pattern of a cross in the center of a heart. As St. Ita taught, we must take our hearts,
our innermost feelings and thoughts, and move ever more deeply into the Mystery
of the Cross. We connect our deep selves
with the Wonder of the Eternal One, the Love behind and beneath the universe, suffering
and dying as one of us, and by that overcoming death and failure for us all. St. Ita’s Cross is like a labyrinth, where we
live with our daily concerns, worries, and distractions in the outside wheel of
humanity. As we gradually enter into the
thin place of the center, we become aware of the presence of God, and replace
our worry with a sense of love and being loved, replace our distraction with
Lady Wisdom. The Labyrinth is about centering; St. Ita’s
cross says our heart’s center should be in the cross.
Lent begins on February 18. As part of our Lenten devotions, we will be
placing various crosses up around the Church Nave to help us reflect on the
Paschal Mystery. On Fridays, we will be
reading at noon a series of meditations on various crosses and aspects of the
Passion story, the Stations of the Cross.
This is not about gore, or about
bloody substituted punishment. The Abba
Jesus taught us about is a God of Love, not Violence. The Cross is about God’s solidarity with us
in all that it means to be human, good and bad.
It is a symbol of God’s compassion for us, of God’s suffering along with
us, and the reconciliation and healing that results, not about transferred
punishment and vengeance.
Though the Bible
talks about God’s anger and forgiveness, this is a metaphor to describe how it
feels when we are alienated from God and God’s purposes, and how it feels when
we are reconciled. God loves us in all
and at all times. Sin is alienation from
that, being unable to feel it, be lifted by it. Its opposite is reconciliation
or healing, not merely the “forgiveness” of personal relations. Danish
theologian Soren Kirkegaard said “Sin is: in despair not wanting to be oneself
before God . . . Faith is: that the self in being itself and wanting to be
itself is grounded transparently in God.”
‘Confession’ and ‘repentance’
are ways of describing the pilgrimage of Lent, the centering of our hearts, our
walking meditation into the Labyrinth, of growing into what St. Ita called nursing
the baby Jesus, or journeying into the Heart of the Cross.
I pray that we all
may have a holy Lent, and a deep experience in it of God’s love as we make the
journey.
Grace and Peace,
Fr. Tony+
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