Lent at Christ Church, 2014
Lenten Programmes & Events
at Christ Church
On Tuesday evenings throughout Lent, there will be special Lenten Services of Holy Communion with reflections on the Beatitudes in Dante’s Purgatorio. The services are at 7:00pm on the following Tuesday evenings:
Tuesday, March 18th 7:00pm
Tuesday, March 25th 7:00pm
Tuesday, April 1st 7:00pm
The Lenten Journey
The season of Lent concentrates the meaning of the Christian pilgrimage to God and with God into a span of forty days (excluding Sundays!). It is really the journey of the soul in love; the love of God and that love as moving more and more within us.
We go up to Jerusalem, Jesus tells the disciples on Quinquagesima Sunday, the Sunday before the beginning of Lent on Ash Wednesday. We go up with Jesus and we go up in the increasing and growing awareness of what Jerusalem means. A journey in love, to be sure, but one in which we confront all the forms of our unloveliness. Ultimately, the divine love bears all our unloveliness on the Cross of Christ Crucified. What really is our unloveliness? Sin, in all its endless forms, to be sure, but there is more to the journey than just the unloveliness of our sins. There is also the transforming power of love which seeks to make us lovely. Dante’s Purgatorio presents the programme of grace perfecting our humanity, “to decline from sin, and incline to virtue” as the Penitential Service in the Prayer Book puts it.
It will be our challenge this Lent to contemplate the Beatitudes from Christ’s Sermon on the Mount as employed by Dante in his Purgatorio and as illustrating the idea of grace perfecting nature.
It shall be for us, I pray, the occasions of the deepening of our penitential adoration; our love for God borne out of his deep love for us signaled so powerfully in the crucifixion of Christ, the place, as it were, where sin and love meet and where love triumphs and reigns.
It is really all a question about the direction of our loves and our lives. We begin, to be sure, with the dust and ashes of Ash Wednesday, but only to embark upon the upward path of grace transforming and perfecting our hearts and souls.
“Lord, for thy tender mercies’ sake, lay not our sins to our charge; But forgive that is past, and give us grace to amend our sinful lives; To decline from sin, and incline to virtue; That we may walk with a perfect heart before thee, now and evermore” (BCP, p. 614).
Fr. Curry