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Happy Ruination Day!

On top of being Good Friday this is the day Abraham Lincoln was shot, the Titanic struck an ice berg and one of the worst storms in the dust bowl hit.

Gillian Welch wrote about it.

For various reasons this has been the year I have needed the Resurrection to be real, which means I also need Death to be real. One with out the other is cheating. Today is the Day of Death. I used to wear black every Good Friday from my Holy roller days in college to my moody contemplative days during my 20s. I made Holy Week play lists and contemplated the crucifixion.

The one Holy Week practice I have maintained is reading T.S. Eliot's "The Four Quartets" every Easter season. This year I have found an extra measure of comfort in it as I have read it as a love letter to suffering. Everything is transient. Nothing really sticks around and to get better first we must get worse. I attended a funeral of a respected spiritual leader recently and the man who gave the homily read from The Dry Salvages:

For most of us, there is only the unattended 
Moment, the moment in and out of time,
The distraction fit, lost in a shaft of sunlight,
The wild thyme unseen, or the winter lightning,
Or the waterfall, or the music heard so deeply
That is not heard at all, but you are the music
While the music lasts.These are only hints and guesses,
Hints followed by guesses; and the rest 
Is prayer, observance, discipline, thought and action. 

This is now my road map for how my heart could possibly navigate what is laying in front of me as I try to accept that suffering has moved into my neighborhood. For actual hard and tragic things have started coming into my life; people getting cancer, friends who could not get pregnant or miscarried, divorces, and recently death. I used to really value knowing I worshiped a God who suffered and died. Now it is more of an anathema to me. If suffering can be avoided, avoid the suffering. Don't go see the play, steer around the iceberg, practice crop rotation to preserve the soil, don't submit to death on a cross.

The hint half guessed, the gift half understood, in Incarnation. 

Which is the comfort. Suffering has moved onto my block, but Christ did too and only one is passing through.

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