Dear Friends,
I had a birthday on Tuesday. Some years my birthday falls on Ash Wednesday. This year it fell on Shrove Tuesday. Mardi Gras is a much better day for a celebration!
Part of my birthday was spent with my mom, who lives in a seniors’ home. As fate would have it, her residence was marking Fat Tuesday with a party in the atrium, and we decided to go. Many of the residents were present. Some were sitting at long tables, others arranged in groups of three or four. It didn’t take long for my mom to wave at this friend and that friend, and to share a word or two. My mother always loved a party! It didn’t take long for the Anglicans in the room to find each other. We talked about the Church and old friends, cake and coffee and the state of the world.
One of these Anglicans was Joan, a parishioner at St. George’s in Guelph back when I served as a curate in the late 1980s. At one point in the conversation, Joan looked at me and said, “Andrew, you once said something very helpful to me back at St. George’s. You said, Try not to get swept away by the river, it’s better to stay on the shore. Do you remember saying that to me? It was helpful then and maybe it’s helpful to remember now.”
It is so easy to be swept away by the anxiety, the rhetoric, the meanness. It’s easy to take umbrage after a meeting in the Oval Office, the threat of a tariff, the talk of a Riviera in Gaza. It’s easy to be drawn into the escalation of frustration, the desire to retaliate, to get even. It is tempting to dive headfirst into the river of disruption to make a point or to have the final word. And if we do, or when we do, we run the risk of being swept away.
In times like these, it’s better to stand on the shore – the edge – and to plant our feet in the old ways of Lent: self-examination, penitence, prayer, fasting and almsgiving, and by reading and meditating on the word of God.
By taking on the practices and disciplines of Lent, we let go and we let God. We let God shape the ways of grace and mercy in us. We let God shape the heart of Jesus in us. We let God set the way that our feet will go through Friday to the other shore on Sunday.
May you keep a Holy Lent.
Yours in Christ,
The Rt. Rev. Andrew Asbil
Bishop of Toronto
P.S. Today is another birthday: Bishop Mauricio Andrade, the bishop of our companion Diocese of Brasilia, was born three days after me. Feliz aniversário, Bispo!
