Lent

Google Docs keeps eating my posts before I can publish them......so reconstruction is the order of the evening.......maybe reconstruction is the theme of this whole blog. . . .

What I wrote to go up today was about Lent, and I do not remember any of it . . . yes, Ash Wednesday was a week ago, but I only read Kathleen Norris' "Detachment" chapter last night. During a crisis in her life, she was staying with Benedictines near a hospital and came to a meal to find the table decorated for Mardi Gras. "We [one of the sisters] talked about Lent," Kathleen wrote, and she told me that for most of her life she had considered it only in punitive terms, as a time of self-denial. "Now," she said, "I still fast, but my reasons for fasting have changed." She hoped to recover Lent as an aspect of spring itself, a time of waiting, but also of burgeoning hopes.

And so the chord struck with "When the Heart Waits," which I have had to put down. Having read it, the sense is, "OK, I get it. . . ." But the waiting continues and the three-day weekend looming. So, I thought of observing Lent, at least somewhat. Being conscious of a kind of fasting, of giving up some things in order to think about others.

And that may take me back to "When the Heart Waits" . . .