Farm work and Lent...Risky business

We put our hay up in round bales now. Old age, general decrepitude and a lack of able bodied friends has made dealing with square bales problematic. While helping Michael load a round bale, I tripped and took a nasty tumble landing on my face and chest, spread eagled on a pallet. I cussed a little at my clumsiness…o.k., I cussed a lot. The only damage was a bone bruise on my sternum so I got off lucky. This was not my first accident on a farm. Cows and horses have stepped on my feet. I have fallen off the hay wagon several times beginning as a child. I have that particular falling technique down pat now…loosen up, roll on impact. Tripping is a specialty of mine as is getting knocked around by cows. It comes with the territory. Farming and Ash Wednesday are both a risky business.

Tonight at six we will gather around the table to begin the forty day journey into the wilderness of Lent. It is a dangerous trip, full of sacrifice, remembrance, grief, repentance, dying and death. It is not a time for the fainthearted or the lukewarm. Pastor Pat will mark our foreheads with those greasy black ashes from last year’s Palm Sunday palms, and out into the world we will go with the outward mark of our inexplicable belief that death is not the final word.

Last year at this time, we were waiting for death to pay a visit. David was doing the work of dying and we were trying to help the best we could. Diane, his wife, was the midwife for David’s death and new life. All of us, including David, were worn out, plumb worn out, from the hard work. We watched as the body we knew as David melted away, destroyed by cancer within. Flashes of the man we knew and loved surfaced occasionally. He would rouse enough to thank his nurses in Hospice for their tender care. Midwestern courtesy and self deprecating humor were the last to go under. And then, he left us. Like a snake splitting his skin, shedding the old, he moved on leaving the worn out body behind. This Lent, I will be looking for what needs to die in me…what is unlike the God I love. Jesus tells us we must be willing to die like a grain of wheat so that new life and fruit can come into being.

This Friday night, the farm family will gather for a soup supper. When darkness falls, we will walk to the sunset deck, carrying the prayer lanterns David and Diane bought last year in Thailand. We will remember ten good things about David, say and write our prayers, sending them skyward with the illuminated lanterns… a little light in the midst of a great darkness.

Lord of Darkness and Light, keep me close to you as I walk this shadowed valley of Lent. Hold me up when I trip and fall. Let me not lose sight of the little light in the darkness that leads me home to you. Amen.

Mardi Gras Parades Past

When I look in the mirror these days, I see pieces of other faces looking back at me. Grandma’s hooded eyes, Aunt Dada’s mouth filled with Mama’s teeth, Daddy’s salt and pepper hair as well as his freckles…I am a living sampler bearing the signs and shapes and sounds of all who have gone before. It is like an unruly Mardi Gras parade of all the characters in my past.  My children and their children carry these same reminders of family they never knew. Sometimes these bits and pieces of the past can reassemble in such a way that someone is said to be a carbon copy of a forbear. Unsettling and reassuring, this embodiment of our past tickles my fancy.

Scientists are delving into the mysteries of the brain. New discoveries will help us understand all sorts of disease as well as explain the biological inner workings of our lumpy grey matter. Our brains, like our bodies and faces, carry the memory of our ancient families and our current ones. Did my instinctive feel for and love of music come from a great-grandmother I never knew who was an opera singer? I wonder if she felt the same rush of emotion I feel when I hear the transcendent sound of voices singing the Hallelujah Chorus.  My children tell me I never cooked like other moms. There was always something new and alarming served at the dinner table. Was that my Great-Aunt Dada, an accomplished cook, trying to be reborn? We are pieces of our past reassembled in a new pattern that is not so new after all.

Some of us are answer seekers. Like Thomas the Doubting Disciple and Bill Nye the Science Guy, we need to know how and why and when and where. This quest for understanding has produced wonderful knowledge… penicillin, rocket ships, telescopes. Question askers of a different sort create art of all kinds as they seek to express the river of new life that runs through their souls. There are those among us who use words to try to capture the mysteries of our Source, to ask the God questions in language. And, there are those who try to experience God through music, meditation, ritual, worship, sweat lodges, whirling to an inner need to feel and taste and touch the Untouchable.  

Whatever our past, however our brains are wired, whoever we are a compilation of, we are all a grand pastiche, a mixed media collage of a God who has no beginning and no end.  What a lovely puzzle this is, one we cannot see entirely put together on the card table, but beautiful nonetheless.  So, I live with the mysteries of how I came to be who I am and how you came to be who you are. I rest in the assurance that we are all kin. Like family all over the world, we are all a little crazy and a little wise, but we belong to each other. Someday we will understand but for now, I am grateful for my family and grateful for all the ways of being in this world.

God, I give thanks for the Mardi Gras parade of my past… all of those whose memories I carry with me, known and unknown.  Most of all though, I am grateful for your memory and your presence in my life’s parade. Love you…