Coracle Trust E-Reflections
Lent: The journey of descent
Friday 18 March 2011
We walk in the footsteps of God for the feet of our God will become for us the Way, the Truth and the Life In this hour - Liturgies for pausing. Dorothy McRae-McMahon
The assent to descend
The lives of Jesus and John continue their parallel paths. Both are now baptizing, and more are going to Jesus than John. Curiously John does not 'follow' Jesus, neither does he compete. He's trying not to get in the way (between bride and groom). 'He must increase, and I must decrease.' Their paths will soon diverge markedly: John to imprisonment, Jesus into a spell of popularity. Both will then 'meet' in violent deaths, and their emotions and thoughts along the way will have had a deep impact on them. Ultimately the journey or movement of the soul is meant to take some form of descent.
In what sense are we to decrease?
This is surely a great Lenten theme, but what does that look like for us? A sense of perspective at least - God is big and I am small, to put it simply and crudely. A healthy suspicion of our defensivesness and our protection of self-interests perhaps? Possibly it's more that to live we must die as Jesus puts it later or as one writer put it 'we die becoming'. There is a necessary acquiescence to death, to the fading of the false self (the part of us that lives for separateness)and its demands for centre-stage and all those dazzling lights. And why decrease? Salt and light comes to mind. Andrew Hook