Last week Sunday, Transfiguration Sunday, we had an amazing healing eucharist service at All Saints Honolulu. It was a true gift of the Lord.
Shrove Monday and Shrove Tuesday, were properly delightful.
And it was my deep joy to lead the Ash Wednesday services at both St. Benedict Hall and All Saints. Both were very sweet times of worship.
By sunset on Thursday, I was down with a terrible virus that my family is still fighting valiantly to defeat.
The first two days of the sickness were particularly terrible. Unceasing high-grade fever and a dizzying migraine perpetual, were attended by the whole panoply of aches, muscle cramps, chills, and frequent trips to the lavatory —a veritable Jabberwocky of bodily discomfort.
During those two days I listened to Max McClean read through the books of Leviticus and Numbers as I drifted between various degrees of awareness. And I must say it was an absolute treasure.
Sure, I didn’t like missing time with my family on my day off, nor did I enjoy having to shuffle and reschedule, nor do I enjoy right now playing a 3.5 day catch-up on church and writing work while several of the kiddos are still down with the fever. That’s not what I mean.
I do mean that there is something deeply refreshing —and truly Lenten— about receiving, unlooked for, a kind of bodily mortification that radically simplifies your attention. Sickness makes us present in the body. “This is me in my panful state, right here and now, before the eyes of heaven.”
Enter Leviticus and Numbers —books so easily rushed through in a year-long reading plan. They are books which require a specific kind of space-time attention: this animal gets cut this way, placed in this fashion; the sacrifice must be eaten here; the Israelites marched from this site to this site; here’s where Balaak met Balaam, here’s the shoulder of mountain from which they gazed on the ranks of Israel; this tribe numbers this much and camped in this location… etc. You get the idea.
It’s not quite narrative like Genesis and Exodus were for the most part. They’re books about arrangements in time and space. They are very difficult books for contemporary westerners to read because we have largely forgotten how to hear texts like these. We struggle to dwell with their images and patterns. We keep wanting to ask “okay, so what’s the point?” wondering when the next episodic story will take place.
Lying sick and agued, with almost all of my hurried okay-whats-the-point-lets-move-on faculties turned-off or turned-down low, with nothing else to do (my eyes felt too hot to read or watch tv) but listen, I entered into the world of the tabernacle in a powerful way. So many of my readerly biases became strange to me, I got caught-up in the flow of the internal logic of the sacrificial law.
It is easy, when we live in (mostly) temperature controlled boxes of 72 degrees, and drive in (mostly) temperature controlled smaller boxes of 72 degrees, and scroll through temperature-less worlds of wealth and information in the palms of our hand, to forget the Living Flame at the heart of the world and to forget the world He made —not a world of theories or informatics, but of hair, flesh, dust, fire, woodsmoke, mildew, carbuncles, plague, bread, and hammered bronze. Something about being sick reminds you of this real world.
I do not wish you sickness during this Lent, no, not at all. But I do wish you an awakening of the heart to encounter the world of God and the Word of God with the same kind of reality that sickness tends to carry in its train.