Seasonality.

It’s Lent.  For the first couple of weeks of Lent I was still meeting friends, driving kids to activities, and having breakfast in restaurants.  I started out just making jokes about how I was “giving up touching my face for Lent.”  And then the changes came hard and fast; one week I was grocery shopping with gloves on, trying to get the slippery ends of the produce bags to open with the knitted woolen fingertips; then I was skipping trips to the gym; and now I have given up going anywhere at all, except a daily walk in the sunshine, apologetically skirting a six-foot radius around all the other humans in my path.  We have given up close contact for Lent.  It is a Great Lent, one that makes us wonder what Easter will come.

But the global spread might have struck us at any season of the year.  Would we find meaning equally well in each?  Does that give the lie to our sense of pattern?

Had it been during Advent, surely we would be talking of the darkness of winter, in sin and error pining, and longing for the light.  Had it struck in the Christmas season, what then?  I imagine we would be drawing a contrast instead; despite the sadness of having to cancel all our holiday parties and Christmas dinners and midnight masses, we’d probably be consoling each other with talk of the true meaning of Christmas, and making Grinch jokes.  Maybe after a few drinks we’d work a little too hard on our analogies and wax poetic:   giving up our freedom to stay secluded in our houses, for the health of the world, is a little like the God of the universe giving up a measure of dignity and freedom to become enclosed in flesh, in helplessness.   How about another drink?

Had it struck in the Easter season, what then?  I guess we would be grateful to have made it through Holy Week and the Triduum, before having to step away.  The newly baptized, the ones just received into the church—those of us who have been there know the peculiar post-Easter letdown even in a normal year.  All those months of preparation, the climax of the vigil, the sacraments—and then waking the next morning and just simply getting on with the Christian life, well, it can be anticlimactic.  Imagine, had this struck in the Easter season, being a new Christian, and suddenly no church to go to:  no persecution, just the doors closed.  What then?  And the rest of us would feel it too, the great nothingness, in the season that ought to be the fullest.  I think we would console ourselves by thinking of the invisible Church, the rest of it, the triumphant, the suffering, going on about their business of rejoicing and praising with nothing more to fear.  Taking over where we left off.

And Ordinary Time?  Maybe we would have thought nothing particularly appropriate, had it struck us at the start of the long ordinary season.  Perhaps we would think about how we don’t know the day or the hour; we are promised wars, and reports of wars, and signs, the sorts of things like earthquakes and pestilences, every single ordinary day; none of them will help us identify the end, because they will keep on coming, and we will keep on getting through them, however portentous they seem, generation after generation.  This is the ordinary thing about ordinary humans:  we like to imagine patterns and messages where there is only the stochastic march of random events.  Had it struck us in ordinary time, perhaps we would be reminded only that suffering is ordinary, and maybe this is a portent and maybe it isn’t;  but it doesn’t much matter, because our job is the same either way.  Go on loving God, and go on looking out for our neighbors just as we would look out for our own selves, and not give up on that.  Keep getting up every morning and doing it all over again.

I am sure we would have come up with a way to fit the pestilence, the lockdown, the isolation, the loss of our sacramental life, into our year.  Whichever season it happened to land in.

But darn it.  Doesn’t it feel that it belongs when it is?  Don’t we who keep Lent feel, just a little bit, oriented to it?

We’re told it will likely last through Easter and beyond.  When that happens, if we are still shut in, will we feel any change?  Will we sense the season?

Comments

[melanie b]

I really like this meditation on sacramentality and seasons and our sense of pattern.

Having a friend in New Zealand, it always strikes me that all the resonances the liturgical year has here in the northern hemisphere are just not there for our fellow Christians in the south for whom the nativity of Christ happens not in the dark of the year but at high summer, for whom Easter is a fall celebration, ushering in winter.

Or how a friend in China reminds me that white, the color of the baptismal garment, there represents death and mourning and funerals. It's still got an echo a meaning, an appropriateness, but it's almost the opposite of the meaning of white to us westerners.

We see patterns, we make meaning, the raw material of life becomes story. It's what we do, who we are, tellers of stories, makers of narratives. And isn't that how we relate to God? He comes into history and tells us a story, the story of a relationship... so it seems appropriate that anything can become a part of that story. Does it make it any less real? Or maybe it's part of being co-creators?

A good question about Easter, though. I'm kind of dreading a shut in Easter. Praying for a miracle cure to let us out of the tomb along with Christ.