Lent, Blindfolded
notes from quarantine
Dear Saints,
Okay, let me load the announcements up front:
Our church building will be closed for the next two weeks as we try to weather the storm of the COVID-19 pandemic. I've written more about this below.
All is not lost: Visit our mission hub to stay posted on what's going on in and around OLMC.
We're celebrating Palm Sunday as best we can this year. Check this out and join us.
Our team of spiritual mentors is eager to assist you these days. Let us know if you want to get connected.
And now, the email:
The last two weeks of Lent, traditionally known as Passiontide, call for the veiling of statues and the covering of crucifixes. My chapel-in-exile is home to four such statues, two of which you will have noticed:
Many of you shared with me the pictures and the pain of shrouding your own sacred images. I took great heart in the fact that we are finishing our Lenten journey in solidarity, social distancing and all.
Here are a few of my favorites:
My thought has been, with the covering of our images, that we are taking this last part of our Lenten path blindfolded.
What that means is that we are being deprived even of those things on which we rightly depend, and no longer just those things we need to jettison. Sacred images inspire us. Their beauty reminds us that God is at work in the world, and that his love will win the day. All of this we forgo in order to enter into a veiled time; an unmediated, unseeing abandonment to God, who himself descends into our darkness.
Today we got word that our church, too, will be veiled these next two weeks. Even this, our place of worship, is now shrouded. What a great suffering this deprivation is.
You may remember that I talked about the disciple's hike up the mountain before Jesus' transfiguration. Every step of that journey, I'm convinced, embodied a decision either to grow in trust of Jesus or to pull back. How much the same for us here and now: Our being blindfolded gives us a chance cling more desperately to Christ than we might otherwise have imagined.
This isn't pleasant, and I don't want to romanticize it. But the closing of our churches will not derail the mission of the Church; quite the opposite. Trusting Jesus more fully and following him more closely these blindfolded days, we will be made to receive his love more fully and live it out more sincerely for a world that desperately needs it.
I look forward to seeing you soon, my friends. As always, if you need anything please let me know.
Christ's Peace,
Father Daniel
δοῦλος Χριστοῦ Ἰησοῦ
PS. A couple more memes for you:
