DREADPUBLISHING: The Record - Being Heard, 'Sordid Details Following'* Ash Wednesday + Bowie [YouTube]
:: Update ::
DREADNOUGHT's latest column in The Record newspaper riffs on Ash Wednesday via David Bowie and Pope Benedict XVI:
:: BEING HEARD ‘Sordid Details Following’ ::
By John Heard
Ash Wednesday is the stark start to Lent. In a world at once wired and framed by disconnect, it is remarkable to be stared in the face, told that we were dust and will be dust, signed with thick ash and then encouraged to change our lives to better suit the teachings of Jesus.
With this direct engagement comes an invitation to self-denial. That ash points to the ego fires to come. We introduce pain into our lives to imitate the suffering of Christ. Men seem to focus on sexual abstinence, whereas women are more likely to give up candy or beauty products. These relatively minor privations, we hope, will fix our hearts for Easter. It often works.
Why?
In the recounted or re-enacted violence and ritual drama that follow, as we struggle through Lent to Palm Sunday and meet the peculiar pomp of Holy Week, the Church never lets up. She calls us back to contemplate Christ’s wounds: His side, His hands, His pierced feet.
For someone focussed on Lenten discipline then, even Bowie’s lyrics start to read like a coda to Christ’s passion: ‘I’ve loved all I’ve needed to love. Sordid details following’ (Ashes to Ashes, 1980). This message cannot fail to move us.
Sordid details certainly become the pivot-point of the Church’s Lenten observances. The sordid details of the passion and crucifixion are recalled and repeated.
But it is no mere spectacle.
The sordid details of our own lives are also highlighted. We are called to an ongoing interior conversion, sure, but Lent is the time when most of us get serious about it. This is the bit that sticks.
It has always seemed too easy that a month or so of fasting and abstinence can result in the kind of spiritual payoff that a faithfully kept Lenten vow represents. Nothing, I was shocked to discover as a child, feels better than a clean heart trilling on Easter morning. It is like ten post-confession glows. But I guess that is what the Divine Mercy means. Lent changes lives.
That doesn’t help, however, at the outset. Lent is meant to be hard. It is hard. I find Lent a serious challenge. I had great trouble writing this column. Once you start in on Lent you open yourself up to serious criticism. Only, the judge isn’t some easygoing colleague or loving spouse, it is the Lord of the Universe and you’ve been a miserable young bastard.
So, sordid details get parsed. My suffering is compared with His suffering and the gap between the two, the way His exceeds mine in magnitude, complexity and positive impact, causes even more squirming. Lent, if there were no point to it, would be the nastiest period in the calendar.
But there is a point. There’s that glow.
And near the very end of Lent we might stumble blinking into Holy Week, a time that climaxes the heady ritual. None of it, however, will compare with the tension and beauty, the chiaroscuro pageant at play inside the Catholic who takes the Lenten discipline seriously.
This is what is so hard to explain to non-Catholics. There is something remarkable about Lent that makes all the pomp secondary. As incongruous as it sounds, most of the Catholics at a Maundy Thursday Mass have their heads down as the procession passes. Magnificent watered silks, great clouds of incense, candle-flare and gilded wonders glide past, almost unheeded. Our eyes are fixed on an interior vision of Christ.
What is going on in the head and heart, the things that stir in the soul are, rather, what overwhelms. Like the Blessed Sacrament, most often veiled or hidden in churches, or the ostensibly crushing fact of the crucifixion we hail, look in Catholicism for those things that are hardest to catch sight of: there you’ll find her riches.
:: The Upshot ::
That’s why at Lent, just when the Church seems beside herself with grief and preoccupied with death, she is bursting into life.
One sinner at a time.
:: Resources ::
- Pope Benedict XVI's Message for Lent 2007;
*(Title taken from David Bowie's song Ashes to Ashes).
DREADNOUGHT's latest column in The Record newspaper riffs on Ash Wednesday via David Bowie and Pope Benedict XVI:
:: BEING HEARD ‘Sordid Details Following’ ::
By John Heard
“With a more fervent participation let us direct our gaze, therefore, in this time of penance and prayer, at Christ crucified who, dying on Calvary, revealed fully for us the love of God.” (Pope Benedict XVI, Message for Lent, 2007)This is the entire programme of Lent in one sentence. It is the weeks-long feast of that moment two thousand years ago when we learnt that nothing would ever make sense without Love on a cross at the centre of history.
Ash Wednesday is the stark start to Lent. In a world at once wired and framed by disconnect, it is remarkable to be stared in the face, told that we were dust and will be dust, signed with thick ash and then encouraged to change our lives to better suit the teachings of Jesus.
With this direct engagement comes an invitation to self-denial. That ash points to the ego fires to come. We introduce pain into our lives to imitate the suffering of Christ. Men seem to focus on sexual abstinence, whereas women are more likely to give up candy or beauty products. These relatively minor privations, we hope, will fix our hearts for Easter. It often works.
Why?
In the recounted or re-enacted violence and ritual drama that follow, as we struggle through Lent to Palm Sunday and meet the peculiar pomp of Holy Week, the Church never lets up. She calls us back to contemplate Christ’s wounds: His side, His hands, His pierced feet.
For someone focussed on Lenten discipline then, even Bowie’s lyrics start to read like a coda to Christ’s passion: ‘I’ve loved all I’ve needed to love. Sordid details following’ (Ashes to Ashes, 1980). This message cannot fail to move us.
Sordid details certainly become the pivot-point of the Church’s Lenten observances. The sordid details of the passion and crucifixion are recalled and repeated.
But it is no mere spectacle.
The sordid details of our own lives are also highlighted. We are called to an ongoing interior conversion, sure, but Lent is the time when most of us get serious about it. This is the bit that sticks.
It has always seemed too easy that a month or so of fasting and abstinence can result in the kind of spiritual payoff that a faithfully kept Lenten vow represents. Nothing, I was shocked to discover as a child, feels better than a clean heart trilling on Easter morning. It is like ten post-confession glows. But I guess that is what the Divine Mercy means. Lent changes lives.
That doesn’t help, however, at the outset. Lent is meant to be hard. It is hard. I find Lent a serious challenge. I had great trouble writing this column. Once you start in on Lent you open yourself up to serious criticism. Only, the judge isn’t some easygoing colleague or loving spouse, it is the Lord of the Universe and you’ve been a miserable young bastard.
So, sordid details get parsed. My suffering is compared with His suffering and the gap between the two, the way His exceeds mine in magnitude, complexity and positive impact, causes even more squirming. Lent, if there were no point to it, would be the nastiest period in the calendar.
But there is a point. There’s that glow.
And near the very end of Lent we might stumble blinking into Holy Week, a time that climaxes the heady ritual. None of it, however, will compare with the tension and beauty, the chiaroscuro pageant at play inside the Catholic who takes the Lenten discipline seriously.
This is what is so hard to explain to non-Catholics. There is something remarkable about Lent that makes all the pomp secondary. As incongruous as it sounds, most of the Catholics at a Maundy Thursday Mass have their heads down as the procession passes. Magnificent watered silks, great clouds of incense, candle-flare and gilded wonders glide past, almost unheeded. Our eyes are fixed on an interior vision of Christ.
What is going on in the head and heart, the things that stir in the soul are, rather, what overwhelms. Like the Blessed Sacrament, most often veiled or hidden in churches, or the ostensibly crushing fact of the crucifixion we hail, look in Catholicism for those things that are hardest to catch sight of: there you’ll find her riches.
:: The Upshot ::
That’s why at Lent, just when the Church seems beside herself with grief and preoccupied with death, she is bursting into life.
One sinner at a time.
:: Resources ::
- Pope Benedict XVI's Message for Lent 2007;
- DREADNOUGHT on Ash Wednesday 2005 and 2006; and
- More Bowie on YouTube.*(Title taken from David Bowie's song Ashes to Ashes).
by DREADNOUGHT at 4:27:00 PM
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