In the last two weeks, like most of you I have work a face mask when I left the house. I wore a face mask to walk the dog. I wore a face mask to Spotlight. I wore a face mask to Bunnings. Twice. I wore a face mask at the podiatrist and I wore a face mask to pick up six cinnamon donuts at Donut King. I took my mask off to eat them.
Scientifically, I fully support face masks to stop the spread of aerosol viruses. As a practical matter, I suspect that like many Western Australians, I experienced the mask as a shock to the system. It was constrictive. You had to learn to breathe differently. The facial recognition on my phone didn’t work and I discovered how much I rely on lip-reading to understand what people say. Today is our first day without face masks, and I feel like John Keats on first looking into Chapman’s Homer.
We had an easy time of it, of course. We are living a charmed life here in Western Australia while the rest of the world suffers, often silently and invisibly.
But there’s a lot of trauma and grief and conflict in the air, right now. This accursed virus has been with us for a year now and everything has changed. Our lives will never be the same, and most of us are still processing what it means to live in a world of, perhaps, regular pandemics.
The looming climate crisis is getting closer and realer. The fact that the Liberal Party in Western Australia is campaigning on a promise to ditch fossil fuels and embrace renewable energy is a pretty clear demonstration of how urgent things are getting.
It was less than two weeks ago that a massive fire ripped through bushland not far from here, affecting some of our parish families and so many others. The generous and sometimes manic outpourings of support speak not only to love for our neighbour, but I think to a desperate need to feel like we have control or influence on our surroundings.
Even though it’s many kilometres away, the end of The Trump Experiment, and the accompanying violence and deceit, can’t help but affect us as the Leaders of the Free World expose the gaping wounds in their national psyche.
A coup d’etat in Myanmar, as even a Nobel prize winner cannot hold the centre.
And in our own families and communities – births and deaths, sicknesses and celebrations: all set against a world that seems increasingly fragile and fragmented.
I had a really nice holiday in January. But in my own times of quiet, I had to acknowledge the simmering background noise of trauma, and, like each of you, I had to acknowledge that it affects me and the communities in which I live and serve. We can cover it over with noise and activity, with forced enthusiasm or sentimental language, but, like a persistent buzzing, the grief and despair linger in our minds, often in the background, but periodically creeping in to the foreground.
The customs of the church invite us this Wednesday – whether or not you make to the Eucharist to receive the sign of ashes - to pause for a time and remember that we are dust and to dust we shall return. I find Ash Wednesday a little comical, as if the cloud of witnesses is saying ‘look, you’ve had your fun with baby Jesus and the wise men and the tinsel and the plum pudding – now it’s time to think about your own impending demise’. And it doesn’t stop there. Ash Wednesday is the beginning of a season of forty days in which, by ancient custom and contemporary practice, we invite one another to a time of simplicity, denial and reflection. The old adage is that during Lent you ‘give something up or take something up’ and I know that from Wednesday many of us will be giving up coffee or chocolate or meat or Facebook, and others will take up a time of prayer or reading or meditation, or giving something away or doing proper exercise. But the real purpose of the giving up or the taking up is to create space – in your mind or in your day or in your body. Space in which you can be aware of who you really are, how the world really is, and who God really is in the midst of it.
As if we don’t have enough going on, it’s also that magical time of year when the Parish Council invites you and me to consider our relationship to money, and to commit to planned giving for the coming financial year. A couple of weeks ago, I spoke about our vexed relationship with money, and Lent may well be a time for us to address our complicated and usually dysfunctional relationship with money and possessions. Giving – any kind of giving – is an act of repentance, of changing direction, as we let go of our compulsive need to own and acquire, and seek the good of others over our own.
Remember that you are dust and to dust you shall return.
It’s a strange thing to place ash one the forehead of a person you know reasonably well and remind them they are going to die. A privilege, but a weird one.
But in these times, these unprecedented times, these wild and confusing times, this time of Lent nearly upon us and Easter in the distance – may God grant you the gift of space and stillness. The space to listen to the Spirit, and some calm while you integrate God’s vision for the world with your own desires and hopes.
This Lent, may God grant us each the space to breathe.