“Tapering” is the process of preparing for a marathon or other major race by reducing your training and increasing your eating in the days leading up to the big event. I’m three days out from Saturday’s Catalina Marathon, and I am thoroughly grumpy! As I’ve learned through trial and error, you can’t really rest enough in the week before a marathon. After weeks of running five and six days in a row, I am only running twice this week, for short distances. To make matters worse, I gradually ramp up my carbohydrate intake (a reverse Atkins diet), for four full days before the race. The end result is that on this morning, I feel bloated and sluggish. It’s so counter-intuitive to me to do progressively less “studying” before a big test! I always crammed before exams, but in distance running, cramming invariably leads to disaster. Nothing to do but eat and sit and stretch and wait. If I were more spiritually aware, I would no doubt find some sort of Lenten discipline in tapering, but right now, I just feel like an anxious and slothful little piglet.
Here are a few things I’ve noticed lately:
Kendall Harmon posts what I think is the best review of the Passion of the Christ that I’ve seen so far; it’s written by a Father Leander Harding. Here’s an excerpt:
Both for religious and non -religious people there is a stereotype of the cross as the place where an angry God punishes Jesus instead of us. Many of the critical reviews of the movie castigate the movie for promoting this stereotype.
But this is not the story of the cross that Gibson is telling. In the beginning of the film when Jesus is tempted in the garden by the Satan figure, the temptation is “that one man can not bear the sins of the world.†The burden that Jesus bears in the film is not the burden of the Father’s anger but the weight of sin, the piling up of human hatred and evil, from the banal calculating evil of Pilate and Caiaphas to the stupid, intoxicated blood lust of the Roman soldiers… The Cross is not the apotheosis of the Father’s anger but the measure of His love and of the lengths He goes to transform and redeem. That is the familiar Christian story that I believe the filmmaker is trying to tell.
I don’t normally link to quizzes, but this one was particularly brief and fun (thanks to Annika, Lorie, and Candied Ginger); take the Book Quiz at Blue Pyramid. I ended up being “100 Years of Solitude” by Marquez. I’m not sure I identify with the reasons why:
Lonely and struggling, you’ve been around for a very long time.
Conflict has filled most of your life and torn apart nearly everyone you know. Yet there
is something majestic and even epic about your presence in the world. You love life all
the more for having seen its decimation. After all, it takes a village.
Hmmm.
And here is a link to the sermon that my friend Scott Richardson (dean of the cathedral in San Diego) preached last Sunday. At length, Scott quotes from Dostoevsky’s Grand Inquisitor. In one part of that famous story, an aged Spanish cardinal confronts Jesus, who has returned unexpectedly to 16th century Seville:
(The cardinal) sees everything (Christ’s miraculous works of healing and love) and commands his guard to arrest Jesus immediately. In the middle of the night the prelate comes to visit the prisoner. Why, he asks, do you come to hinder us? You have no right to add anything to what you have said in the past. Tomorrow I will condemn you and burn you at the stake as the worst of heretics.
You come to set people free. That is not what people want; freedom is a curse for most humans, a terrible burden. We relieve them of that burden and carry it ourselves. You were once offered three temptations by the wise and mighty spirit in the wilderness. You rejected them all in the name of freedom. Instead of taking possession of human freedom, you increased it and thereby burdened the spiritual kingdom of humanity with suffering forever. In place of rigid laws, you gave them free hearts to decide right from wrong, having only your image before them as a guide. It is too much and it has taken us all these years to rectify your tragic error. You once scattered the flock; we have gathered it – weak, rebellious, fearful incomplete creatures created in jest. We save them from the terrible anxiety and great agony they endure in making a free decision for themselves. We will not allow you to so burden them ever again.
Reflecting on both this passage from Dostoevsky and on Mel Gibson’s movie, Scott concludes his sermon this way:
My question now, as I come to the end of this offering, is not: Who killed Jesus? It is, rather: Who uses their gift of freedom to choose to come to the aid of the suffering Christ, and all whom he loves, in the present moment? Who has discovered the truth of the old adage; in choosing service we find our perfect freedom? Who freely chooses to wipe the brow and carry the cross even now? And, most important; is this - active love freely chosen and freely offered - the narrow door that Jesus speaks of…?
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