A Confessional Meditation for Lent, Adapted from "The Book of Common Prayer"

Most merciful God,
I confess that I have sinned against you
     in thought
          by what I have done
          and by what I have left undone,
          thus not loving you with my whole heart
          and not loving my neighbor as myself;
     in word
          by what I have done
          and by what I have left undone,
          thus not loving you with my whole heart
          and not loving my neighbor as myself;
     in deed
          by what I have done
          and by what I have left undone,
          thus not loving you with my whole heart
          and not loving my neighbor as myself.
I am truly sorry, and I humbly repent.
Have mercy on me, and forgive me;
     that I may delight in your will
     and walk in your ways,
     to the glory of your Name. Amen.

A White-Tailed Deer in Distress

I went out mid-morning today for a 2-hour walk along Goose Creek, about 10 miles west of us in Loudoun County, with the temperature about 10 degrees. Goose Creek is a tributary of the Potomac River. In the first half of the 1800s investors began to build a canal to run beside stretches of it as it neared the Potomac to bypass low-grade rapids in the creek. The idea was to transport flour from the many mills along Goose Creek's 50 some miles across the Potomac to the C&O Canal, then to Washington and Alexandria. As with some other canal projects of the time, the railroads put the Goose Creek Canal out of business before it could be completed and make a profit. About 1/4 mile up from the creek's entrance into the river, a walker can still see one of the sandstone locks from the 1850s, and for some way up the creek one can see the remnant of the canal itself. At any rate, I enjoyed walking about 3 miles along the creek, seeing the canal lock, and observing many birds: about 6 great blue herons; many juncos; wrens; flickers; sparrows; mallards; canvasbacks; a downy woodpecker, a tufted titmouse; a belted kingfisher. Some parts of the creek showed considerable ice; some parts ran free. The most interesting experience occurred as I was exploring around the canal lock. I heard a crashing sound in the woods behind me, and I turned to see what appeared to be a young adult white-tailed deer bolting among the trees and brush toward the creek, about 15 yards from me. The deer had small antlers. It must have walked or run through some kind of ribbons, perhaps once attached to balloons, for the ribbons seemed snagged on the deer's antlers and trailed behind as the deer ran in agitation. I walked quickly after as the deer found its way 7 to 8 feet down the steep bank to the creek. Trying to cross on the ice, the deer's hooves slipped and splayed and slid out from under it, and the deer fell heavily on its side on the ice in the middle of the creek, with the pink and blue ribbons contrasting with the white, steel, gray, and brown of the ice and the deer. Stunned, the deer lay there for a moment. Then it struggled to stand and awkwardly continued to the far bank. There it slipped again and fell through the thinner ice onto its side and into the shallow cold water edging the bank. Again, it seemed stunned, this time for about 30 seconds. Finally it struggled again to stand up out of the water and gingerly mount that bank to get away from the river and disappear into woods on the other side. This was a dramatic scene to witness. I could not help but wonder what will become of this deer, with several feet of pink and blue ribbons trailing from its head and down along its side as it negotiates the wooded and developed areas along Goose Creek and the Potomac River in eastern Loudoun County.

Who Will Be in the Kingdom?

I had better accustom myself to the truth that there will be people in the kingdom of God I think should not be there; people I do not want to be there. If I cannot acknowledge that this will be true, then I have simply made the kingdom over in my own image. If however, by grace, I come to the point where I can admit that this will be true, I had better start now learning how to love, in the cruciform not sentimental sense, beyond my own reflection. For the full humbling depth of this truth is that some other person in this world must grow accustomed to the prospect that I may well be among those in the kingdom of God, even though that person thinks I should not be there, that person does not want me there. How can this be? In the end the inclusion of at least some we consider the unlikely, the unliked, is likely, as it is God’s kingdom, not ours; and he lovingly embraces, in the cruciform sense, where and when we do not. This we must account as grace and mercy, as good news; for if we look truly within, we must sooner or later realize, however excruciatingly, there is no deserving of residence in that kingdom.