Yesterday I felt overwhelmed by the number of things to complete by the end of the week, and as a result couldn't get any of them done. So I retreated to a Westdale coffee shop -- one of those "in-but-not-of-the-world-around-me" places that usually helps me focus. I hoped to find a way out of the looming miasma of all-too-familiar feelings of inadequacy and failure.
I picked up my coffee at the counter, found a smallish corner table with an outlet for my laptop, got set up to work, and waited for the toasted and buttered rosemary scone I had ordered. And when the young woman from behind the counter brought it to my table, I saw it -- the sign of the day and of the holy gift I had completely forgotten to think about. On her forehead was an ashen cross.
Ash Wednesday.
I felt like I should say something. Congratulate her on bearing the sign? Wish her well? Let her know -- because I needed to know and needed others to know -- that I understood what the ash and the cross and the sign were all about, that I am part of that community of penitent faith in the world?
I said nothing ... because nothing seemed appropriate to say.
And then as I looked around, I saw others. Around a table against the wall, drinking coffee and calmly reading and chatting, three University students each with an ashen cross marked on their foreheads. Clearly set apart from the others in the coffee shop, even as they were one with, and among them. No big to-do. No fuss. Just calmly bearing the sign as a witness to their participation some time earlier in the day in a liturgy and a community of penitence.
I felt sad not to be one of them -- that I had not been to an Ash Wednesday service too.
I began to wonder, are there other ways too -- everyday ways of particular behaviour and posture, of distinctive speech and action and manner of relationship, that just as clearly mark and identify the lives of those in the world who have learned to be humbly and honestly penitent?
And I wonder, too, whether sharing in and learning the discipline of honest penitence might have been -- and may still be, the way out of the oppressive fear of inadequacy and failure that so easily captures me when I feel overwhelmed by what I think I need to be doing. Feelings of failure are not the same -- and not as liberating, as the practice of penitence.
I wonder what exactly would I confess and repent of, to be free of the distracting and restless anxiety that possessed me yesterday?
... a p.s. about the title of this blog:
I have read that "Lent" as the name for this season is related in part to the French word lente, which means "to move slowly." That's what I hope to do in this season and with the discipline of this blog -- to slow down a bit, and find a way to calm the infernal monkey-mind and anxiety I too often suffer about all the things I think I should be doing and need to be doing, to be able maybe for a while just maybe to actually listen (maybe) to my heart and to my feelings and to the gracious liberating mystery of the divine present.
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