Ready or not
By Missy Morain
I tried to skip Lent this year. It wasn’t entirely intentional. There wasn’t any conscious thought to it. I went to the Ash Wednesday service, got my ashes, and even led the Litany of Penitence from the center aisle of the National Cathedral. Yet my head was never really in it and I let other aspects of my life take over. I never came up with something to give up or to add into my day. Somehow living 1,000 miles away from my brother using my teenage standby of “I will get along with my brother” didn’t seem heartfelt or appropriate. Little did I know that Lent would catch up with me.
On the Saturday before Palm Sunday I awoke to phone call from my father telling me that my grandfather had gone into a coma. Around dinner time my mother called to tell me that my grandfather had died. I wasn’t surprised by either phone call. My grandfather was 94 years old and nothing at that age is really unexpected. Unlike the death of Jesus, Papa’s was relatively painless and peaceful, surrounded by people who loved him.
Quickly the mechanics of gathering a large family from across the country began. Life took over again. The details of arranging plane tickets, delayed flights, planning work coverage, getting on a plane, seeing my brother and sisters all took over the space which I could have created to begin grieving, to begin feeling. Allowing me to put aside what my mind and body were telling me to pay attention to.
I arrived in Iowa and went through the motions, attending the visitation and the funeral, even reading part of the family written obituary. Hearing those around me crying yet unwilling to break that barrier myself until I returned to Washington, DC the day after the funeral. Something broke inside me and I finally began to cry. For me Lent had finally begun.
Easter Sunday came only four days after my grandfather’s funeral. I had every intention of going to Easter service but couldn’t walk in the door when the time came. I wasn’t ready for the resurrection. I wasn’t ready to celebrate and say “alleluia, Christ has risen”.
Funny thing about the resurrection is that much like Lent it comes regardless of whether I am ready for it or not. Life works in cycles much like that of the liturgical year. Birth and death and renewal occur whether I am paying attention to them or not. The liturgical calendar of the church helps me to remember this and to remember that there is a point where I will feel ready to celebrate the resurrection again. I might not be there quite yet, and that is just fine, but it gives me hope to know that I will be ready eventually. Ready to say “Good Papa Fred” and hello to the new life, to the resurrection that surrounds me.
Missy Morain is program coordinator at the Cathedral College at Washington National Cathedral. She blogs at Episcopal Princess.

These words come from a meditation about a type of icon called the Virgin of Loving Kindness, or the Eleousa, the most famous example of which is perhaps the Virgin of Vladamir. Williams presents the hunger of the Christ child as a revelation of God’s passionate love for humanity. Perhaps God longs for us just as much as we long for God, not out of any lack but out of a superabundance of love in all its forms. Notwithstanding the powerful insights of the theologies of agape, God also has an eminent capacity for friendship and desire. The basis for these loves which ground human community and intimate partnership is found forever in the blessed exchange among the three persons of the divine Trinity, who give and receive eternally within the divine society in which “none is afore or after other.” In the mystery of the Incarnation, this love spills out to bless the world tangibly, revealing in an especially vivid way the inner dynamic of God’s fruitful love that leads God to create and redeem the world in freedom. What is more, in Christ, God’s love becomes our love, as love is returned for love and we are swept up, in the grace of the Spirit, into Christ’s own relationship with the One he called “Abba, Father.”