As the Lenten season comes to fruition, we experience it first as a time of the old life coming apart.  As we shed winter jackets and caps and gloves, we bare ourselves to the gusts of wind and showers of the season that chill us unexpectedly, reminding us again of our vulnerability as creatures of dust.  In our minds, as we read the lessons of the season together, we are exposed to the impending suffering of Jesus.  We can read the signs, and we know what is coming: the cleansing of the temple, the acclamation of the crowds who would crown Jesus king, the overwhelming evidence of healing power proving the word spoken with authority, all incense the authorities.  The known world is falling apart. I remember the words from the 1942 Hymnal, the poem by James Russell Lowell: "…truth forever on the scaffold, wrong forever on the throne."  We feel the anger and hostility growing, anger and hostility--they are palpable--that will put Jesus on the cross.  Those feelings chill us to the bone, work a kind of death, a kind of restriction in us, that putting on jackets and caps and gloves won't make go away.  No, we have to go through it to receive the promise of Easter.

It is a time of contradictions.  We experience the promise of warmth and sun, and hear the Hosannas of the Palm Sunday Procession.  Then the wind and wet and the judgment leading to the cross chill us to the bone.  It is a time of terror and awe.  We deal with it by cleaning.

Traditionally, the church prepares for Holy Week and Easter by cleaning.  We strip the altar in the Maundy Thursday service.  It is a time of silence.  We go deep inside ourselves.  It is a time to polish the silver and brass, to wash down the pews, the doors to the church, and launder the linens afresh.  It is time to let the fresh air blow through.  In the home, it is spring cleaning time, and there is yard work to do. These are the tasks of Holy Week. 

At home, special breads are made, anticipating the Easter Feast.  Seeds planted during Lent, begin to sprout and show promise of flower.  We color eggs with the children, gather chocolate rabbits and jelly bean eggs and prepare the surprise Easter bunny baskets for the children.

Small gestures we have made in Lent, a stripping away of normal patterns: an extra time of study, of time in prayer come to fruition inside us in a new integration of personality.  The gestures of alms giving that we heard about on Ash Wednesday and have tentatively engaged in these 40 days, now yield bags filled with food for the needy at the Lenten ingathering; we give money for the Easter flowers that will beautify the sanctuary.  Doing without for the sake of others and giving of our wealth, works the gift of charity in us.   

We are creatures of memory, and the remembrance of Easter past, the feast with the promise that all things will be made new heartens us once again.  As we go through the rituals of cleaning, deepening prayer, giving, we are born again on Easter Sunday.

The Reverend Judith Semple Greene