a holy lent

Today is Ash Wednesday, the beginning of Lent, which in the Christian faith is a time of introspection, prayer and quiet, commemorating Jesus' time of temptation and prayer before his Passion. The Book of Common Prayer bids us to a holy Lent, and it as that moment that I quickly admit my inadequacy, thinking how unholy I am, and of course, I rationally understand that to be a human is to be unholy, to miss the mark. In this service, we confront our humanity fairly head-on with the dry, chalky mark on our foreheads as the priest reminds us that we came from ashes and we will return to ashes. We're going to die, a sobering but often useful reminder. And in the order of the service, we list numerable ways how we miss the mark through our actions or lack of them.

Anglican Primates (mostly the Archbishops of each national Anglican Church -- Americans created the less royal Presiding Bishop in the 18th Century after the break with Great Britain) gathered in Tanzania this past week to talk about how the Episcopal Church has harmed communion with the other Churches over the consecration of Gene Robinson as the Bishop of New Hampshire and over not coming out strongly against authorizing rites for the blessing of the union of same sex couples. (A skimpy summation of what they said in their statement at the end of the meeting).

The primates gave our Church a deadline of responding by September of this year, and there has been a lot of posting in the blogosphere about what all this means. It looks like a religious civil war, something that happened in Europe during the Reformation when many people lost their lives. This particular civil war may not kill as many people -- although frankly gay and lesbian folk in certain African countries are in fear of their lives -- but the battlelines among Anglicans have been drawn for sometime.

Not a holy moment, this tearing between one side of the Church and the other.

And I have no great wisdom, no insight on what all this means. A priest once told me that the argument over gay people in the church in some sense does not involve gay people. It the larger straight community coming to terms with what to do with us. It is their struggle, he said. Not ours. But their struggle does have an impact on our lives. And hateful words have a cutting effect.

So I went to church tonight and sat in the nave, and prayed and sang, and listened to the words of Joel, the Old Testament prophet who warned of the dark day of the Lord coming, but who then reminded his audience that God was merciful and slow to punish. Repent. Seek God's forgiveness.

Not us humans. We all want to punish the other, sooner rather than later. It's not hard, getting caught up in the angry words, to want to rumble, like a gang, against those who disagree so disagreeably with us. During the Eucharist tonight, we prayed, as we always do, the Lord's Prayer, forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us. A pretty hard thing, which is why it is in this model prayer. Forgive. Let it go. Don't use up all our energy on our hatreds and our angers. Because we're so good, so holy? No, because we have been forgiven, too.

I am not a very good forgiver. I would much rather give myself the benefit of the doubt, while holding others to a higher standard, assuming the very worst from those with whom I disagree.

Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world, have mercy on us, and grant us thy peace.

I am in my 50s. This past week, I had a phone conversation with my mom. Here's what she wants. We're going to talk again, and its going to be about my being gay. We've skirted this conversation for many years. I have tried never to lie. In some ways, I think we have had tacit understandings -- and yet, she went much further than she had ever had in wanting to talk with me about being gay and being in the Church, something she tells me is wrong and with which she cannot understand. She wants us to talk about it.

As a young man in a fundamentalist family, I was terrified to have that conversation. During the many years of my father's invalidness, it did not seem right. Now he is dead, and my mother is elderly. We will talk. Lotta fears and anxiety, much of which are reflexes from previous anxiety created many years ago. And also some calm, knowing that I love my mother and that she loves me. I cannot convince her of anything else other than I love her.

One response to our not dealing with this is that I have lived much more of my life away from her. It is hard to share what is despised. It has probably also had an effect on me in other ways, too. I have no idea how this will turn out.