"All guests who present themselves
are to be welcomed as Christ."

The changing seasons of the year reflect the changing seasons of life.  There is seed-time and harvest, times of preparation and celebration, of renewal and relaxation, fast and feast.  These represent the natural movements of the human heart and the rhythms of nature, just as earth and sun and the other stars move predictably in their courses.  Like the moon, we humans wax and wane, and the Christian Year takes this truth seriously.  In Lent, forty days of preparation, we strip the worship environment to the bare essentials – font, lectern, altar-table – around which God’s eucharistic people assemble.  We drain the font, usually full to the brim with life-giving water.  Ashes scattered in a ploughshare replace the water – we plough the soil of our hearts, fertilizing the barren earth through prayer, fasting and almsgiving: prayer for the good of our spirit, fasting for the good of our bodies, almsgiving for the good of others.  Both lectern and altar are draped with rich violet hangings, and clergy wear violet vestments.  Low on the colour scale, purple has a calming effect, coolly attractive in Perth’s hot summer, inviting us to follow patiently and deliberately in the footsteps of Christ the crucified king.  Colourful icons of saints around the walls are replaced with black and white Stations of the Cross, a contemporary Via Dolorosa by which we imitate Christ’s final journey, absorbing evil rather than passing it on.  Traditionally, these stations represent the ‘holy geography’ of Jerusalem but do not take us there.  Lent is engagement, not escape.  Rather, the images take us on the journey home, making this familiar place Jerusalem - where Christ dies and lives again, where we are charged with building God’s city of peace, of shalom, salaam.  This simplified liturgical environment matches the liturgy itself: it is sharper somehow, reduced to its bare bones, stark in its directness.  Like a sharp blade it cuts to the quick, recalling us to inner truth and outer usefulness just as it asks us truly to desire God above absolutely everything.  As we gather at the Table of the Word and the Table of the Sacrament we return to our first love, entering again into Christ’s school of self-giving charity and imaginative generosity.  ‘Now we fast that we may fest where the Lord of life presides; may our hunger be increased for the bread which he provides.’  Amen to that; so may it be