Things are as they are

Because I know that time is always time
And place is always and only place
And what is actual is actual only for one time
And only for one place I rejoice that things are as they are...

(TS Eliot, Ash Wednesday)

Lent is a strange period in many ways. We are very used to the idea of Lent, and in or out of a church context we rather superficially associate it with the giving up of all those treats we enjoyed on Shrove Tuesday; but if we miss the sense of its strangeness I think we may have missed the point.

I like Mark's stark account of Jesus' time in the desert: "[T]he Spirit immediately drove him out into the wilderness. He was in the wilderness forty days, tempted by Satan; and he was with the wild beasts; and the angels waited on him." (Mark 1:12-13 NRSV) That's all. No stories of conversations with the tempter, no Scriptural rapiers from our Lord, just the plain facts.

The wilderness is an odd place in itself. There is that very physical wilderness, of course, and no one who has travelled across the Judean Desert will forget its strangeness; at dusk and dawn one could imagine anything, and one's perceptions are stretched thin across the terraced escarpments and the pale dust. Only the ravens seem truly at home there. But the wilderness of the heart is as real a place, and stranger. Hopkins' terrible sonnet, "O the mind, mind has mountains; cliffs of fall/Frightful, sheer, no-man-fathomed" gives the sense of it. The years of the pandemic gave many of us to spend time there. 

But God's angels patrol the wilderness of the mind as they patrolled the Judean wilderness following Jesus' baptism. We may not see them, but they are there in the pain itself. The words of Psalm 119, "Before I was afflicted I went astray, but now I obey your word... It was good for me to be afflicted so that I might learn your decrees" (Psalm 119:67;71 NIV) are not pious platitudes but unvarnished truth.

Frederica Mathewes-Green, writing on the practice of the Jesus Prayer, has this to say: 

At first the Prayer is just a string of words repeated, perhaps mechanically, in your mind. But with time it may "descend into the heart," and those who experience this will be attentive to maintain it, continually "bringing the mind" (the nous, that is) "into the heart."

There is no place within us, however desolate, that the Prayer will not touch, and its patient reach will hold us firm, even when we think we have lost it altogether. Things are as they are only in the endless ground of God's isness. There is nothing else. The mind descending into the heart encounters not the cold of the interstellar wastes but God's own light, love and endless healing mercy. At the end of Lent there is Easter Day.