The Time of the Color Purple

My Christmas de-decorators

Today is Mardi Gras and tomorrow is Lent.  Ash Wednesday is late this year, it seems.  The light is already returning in full force to our Northern Latitude and lately the sun has been shining, making the days even brighter--sometimes painfully so until Jeff and I hunted under the bathroom sink and found the ziplock bag full of sunglasses, which we stashed away after our California vacation.

Despite these signs of Spring there are still a few wayward and forgotten Christmas decorations in the corners of my house.  Today in the quiet of the church, our staff took down the green of Ordinary Time and replaced it with Lenten purple and tonight I'll take down the red globe ornament in the kitchen and the star with the ribbon coming out of the top that displays a rosy Santa Claus benevolently smiling down on everyone who comes in the front door.  Sometimes it is hard to break from the past and to move into the newness offered to us, but tomorrow in the second reading St. Paul will remind us in his letter to the Corinthians:  "Behold, now is a very acceptable time; behold now is the day of salvation." 

Purple in its richness and royalty reminds me that this time of Lent is a time set apart.  Yesterday, in the Atrium, Jackson visited Level 2 just in time for us to revisit the Preparation of the Chalice with a cruet of wine and a drop or two of water and its accompanying prayer: "By the mystery of this water and wine may we come to share in the divinity of Christ, who humbled himself to share in our humanity."

"I wonder what this might tell us about our relationship with God . . . ."  I mused.

"That God is very big and we are very small,"  Jackson replied.

Perhaps Lent is the time to reorient ourselves to the bigness of God and the smallness of ourselves.  Not in a way that encourages shame or self-doubt, but in a way that recognizes the great Truth that we are part of a mystery we cannot even begin to fathom and that this God who is so big as to be beyond comprehension holds our tininess in a love as compassionate as it is merciful.

14th century author, William Langland once wrote, "All the wickedness of this world that man might work or think is no more to the mercy of God than a live coal in the sea."  God is very big, and we are very small.