Ponderings

This afternoon I’ve been working on the Easter bulletin while pondering a sermon on the Lazarus story for this coming Sunday (Lent 5). Although I’ve not yet started on Palm Sunday, the eco-friendly palms are on order. I am a believer in the gift of the liturgical calendar with all of it’s funky dates and traditions, but as a worship planner I end up holding the varied and apparently contradictory layers together as Lent careens to a close.

The liturgical calendar is cyclical like the earth itself. Cyclical, but orderly. Advent prepares for Christmas which gives way to Epiphany’s emphasis on light. Following the climax of Mardi Gras, Ash Wednesday moves us into Lent. Lent, the season preceding the triumphal strains of Easter is filled with the somber tones, it is a season of tilling the earth. Lent closes with Holy Week, the brief span from the Palm processions to Easter is a quiet week in which our spiritual beings lie fallow, in wait. From the quiet bursts the bloom of Easter. And so it goes.

The pile of books and papers on my desk, however, bear witness to the work of tilling simultaneous to the work of planting, weeding, and even harvesting. Quite honestly, the mess on my desk parallels the mess of emotions running through my mind while I try to see the flow of Easter worship.

The pileup of emotions at my computer is much like the pileup of loyalties in our political arena. Instead of gathering mud pies for the partisan fight this fall, the Democrats are still slinging mud at one another. Last week Hillary suggested that only she and John McCain were ready for the White House and Rush Limbaugh encouraged support for Hillary. It’s no wonder we’re all a bit confused. Multi-tasking political loyalties is downright exhausting.

Still, no multi-tasking comes close to the emotional wattage of parenting teens - except perhaps for that of parenting our parents (a hat I’ve yet to try). The thing I’ve learned about traversing these mine fields is that we do so wearing multiple hats and igniting emotions on any number of fronts. Even with parental eyes in the back, we cannot keep it all straight. A friend was sharing the theory that emotions are energy fields and as such can be transmuted into other fields. Maybe so, but to do so would require the ability to clearly identify any singular strand in the complex jumble of emotions.

Luckily, thanks to the buttress theory of stress management, the cacophonies of spiritual, political, and familial movement keep each other in check. Buttressed against one another, they preclude any one arena from dominating my field of vision and, at least in theory, keep me balanced.

For the sake of full disclosure, though, I must confess that my first stop each morning is to check not on the liturgical or the school calendar but rather the delegate count. Maybe the balance needs some tweaking.