Tag: Church year

The afternoon looked like rain; the skies were grey, and trembling. “Hey, did you know today is Ash Wednesday?” a white hipster shouted into his phone, as I led a procession of fifteen men and women dressed in black cassocks and carrying smoking thuribles into a plaza by the subway near my home in San Francisco’s Mission District. “Yeah, no shit.”

When my twenty-three year old son said to me, “Dad, don’t you understand that we’re the first generation that has thought we may be living in the literal end of the world?” I reminded him how my world in junior high school stopped dead as the classroom P.A. systems broadcast moment-by-moment radio reports of the last stage of the Cuban Missile crisis.

What does it mean to have taken a journey and looked at the face of God? What became of them when they returned to their homes? How were their lives different and how are our lives different, after we encounter the light of Christ?

The Christmas Feast is already a fading memory,

And already the mind begins to be vaguely aware

Of an unpleasant whiff of apprehension at the thought

Of Lent and Good Friday which cannot, after all, now

Be very far off.

The Christmas rant is over again,

we’ve heard about the one true meaning,

not to be confused with holiday happenings

of home and hearth, of kith and kin.

But what if this is a sad division?

And I say it is. May it cease.