emerge from their air-conditioned coaches – here ‘the Word became flesh’.
But there is no contradiction, no absurdity. All the holy places of the Holy Land are human places and so bear witness as much to what we do to each other as to what God has done for us. In a word, they partake of our flesh. Nazareth is as the rest. It is of the stuff which – because of Mary’s ‘Let it be’ – the Word became.
‘Let it be to me according to your word.’ Mary’s prayer differs from most of ours. Our prayers, at least those that well from within, rather that merely being mouthed, are more often prayers of protest rather than of acquiescence. I do not like how things are and so I post my objection. ‘Let it not be’, I plead – whether ‘it’ is the rain that threatens to spoil my plans for the day or the cancer that bids to take my life.
‘Let it be.’ Mary’s acceptance of her task is rooted in her recognition that beneath all that is contradictory is an all-encompassing purpose of love. Lines written by the Austrian poet Erich Fried come to mind. Fried escaped from Vienna to England with his mother only after his father had been murdered by the Gestapo. What he witnessed and suffered lends great weight to his words.
It is madness says reason. It is what it is says love.
It is unhappiness says calculation. It is nothing but pain says fear.
It has no future says insight.
It is what it is says love.
It is ridiculous says pride. It is foolish says caution.
It is impossible says experience.
It is what it is says love.
(‘What it is’, 100 Poems without a Country, Calder 1987)
Perhaps those other siren voices – as well as Gabriel’s – whispered in Mary’s ear, the voices of calculation, fear and insight, of pride, caution and experience. If she was indeed a virgin, those voices would have been highly persuasive. But Mary accepted that it is what it is and that it is love that says so.
Where love tells me that ‘it is what it is’ – whatever Gabriel is asking me to do or to suffer – my prayer must be the same as Mary’s ‘Let it be’. How I need her to help me say it!
Ash Wednesday
Joel 2.1–2, 12–17 or Isaiah 58.1–12; 2 Corinthians 5.20b—6.10; Matthew 6.1–6, 16–21 or John 8.1–11
SAVED BY FIRE
The school of St Andrews, Turi, is spectacularly located in the highlands of Kenya’s Rift Valley. From its foundation in 1931 the school was run by ‘Pa’ and ‘Ma’ Lavers, legends to this day among many old Africa hands. For years the school provided education for British ‘missionary kids’. Today the school, while still Christian in its ethos, is both international and multi-cultural.
On the 29th of February 1944 a fire destroyed St Andrews. The Lavers immediately set about rebuilding the school. The symbol of St Andrew’s school today is the phoenix, a mythical bird calling to mind both a brutal event and a blessed hope, both the fire that burned the school down and the faith that ashes are not the end.
After the fire Pa Lavers instituted an annual ‘Phoenix Night’. On Phoenix Night each year a great bonfire is lit in the school grounds. There was a godly custom on Phoenix night, which I hope has not fallen into abeyance. Every child was invited to write on a piece of paper anything and everything in the past year that made them sad or sorry or ashamed. Then they gathered round the fire and, as a sign of their intention by God’s grace to make a fresh start, they crumpled up their pieces of paper and threw them into the flames.
I don’t know whether Phoenix Night at St Andrew’s school ever coincided with Ash Wednesday, but what was affirmed that night resonates with what Ash Wednesday should mean for us.
On Ash Wednesday we enter what T. S. Eliot described as ‘the time of tension between dying and birth’. Our purpose at this time is to rid ourselves of illusions. We pray with Eliot: ‘Suffer us not to mock ourselves with falsehood.’ On Ash Wednesday I hear words that the world around me conspires to drown out. As I receive on my forehead the sign of the cross, imposed in ashes, the minister says to me, ‘Remember that you are dust and that to dust you shall return.’ The words are said to me personally. This is not something that ‘only happens to other people’. I, John Pridmore, am the one who is dust and I am the one who shall return to the dust.
The Victorians were better at facing the fact of death than we are. I do not have a skeleton by me as I say my prayers, as many a Buddhist monk does, but I do have close to hand a copy of a children’s book that sold in its hundreds of thousands in the nineteenth century: Mrs Sherwood’s The History of the Fairchild Family. Old Rogers, the Fairchild’s gardener dies and the children are taken to see his body. ‘You never saw a corpse, I think?’ says Lucy’s father. ‘No, papa,’ answered Lucy, ‘but we have a great curiosity to see one.’ Do we dislike the tale because we disapprove of what we see as a morbid preoccupation with death – or because we continue to mock ourselves and our children with falsehoods, the most mischievous of which being that you must keep young and beautiful if you want to be loved?
On Ash Wednesday I confront the reality that I am a sinner under sentence of death. But sin is not merely what individuals commit. Nor is death only what happens to sentient beings. There is social and corporate sin, the wrongs in which we are complicit by our membership of larger groups. Such groups – the crowd at a football match, the lads out together on a stag night, the nation that declares an unjust war – can behave in ways in which the men and women who form them would never do. We need to find ways of corporate repentance, ways more costly than the token apology from someone in high office.
‘Dust thou art, and to dust thou shalt return.’ The words said to us individually apply to our institutions too. Nobody lasts, but nothing does either. Institutions often find it hard to recognize that the time has come to let go. For example, we feel sad when a church closes, but if that church has had a useful life and has done some good then our sadness is misplaced. It looks as if the institutional church is in terminal decline, but if it is not that is not because it is immortal. Again we make Eliot’s prayer our own: ‘Teach us to care and not to care.’ Nothing lasts, save the love to which, as rivers to the sea, all we are and all we do returns.
On Ash Wednesday we face reality. We face our own sinfulness and mortality and that of the fleeting show of things, our religious structures included. And – very deliberately – we turn. We repent. We draw near to God and – like boys and girls throwing balls of crunched-up paper into a bonfire – we ask that all that is ill in us may be consumed in the inextinguishable fire of his love.
Monday of Holy Week
Isaiah 42.1–9; Hebrews 9.11–15; John 12.1–11
THE GENTLE WAY OF THE CROSS
There are many paths to the cross. Our readings for Holy Week provide one such path. These scriptures lead us to Calvary. Today, and on Tuesday and Wednesday, we are invited to consider one who, like Jesus, comes to us as one unknown. The pattern of his life too was cruciform. He is the subject of a series of poems, written four centuries or more before the time of Jesus, to be found in the later chapters of the book of Isaiah. Often he is just called ‘the servant’ and the poems that speak of him simply described as ‘the servant songs’.
Today we read the first of these ‘servant songs’. God delights, we read, in his servant. He describes what his servant will do. The servant’s purpose, we read,
