Color Me Happy

I was planning to go to Anglican church downtown today but, having woken up at the early time necessary to catch the morning train, I decided that falling asleep during worship wouldn’t really be ideal. So I slept in and went to Catholic church instead.

This turned out to be a good idea, since our choir organist just came back from Australia, so I got to see her and give her a hug. Yay!!

At the beginning of Mass, the priest made a comment about how it was one of the two Sundays a year where clergy wear pink…he said that priests hate wearing pink, but that there is a good reason for the color: happiness, lightness, celebration, a break from penitence.

But his comment about pink isn’t true: Father loved wearing pink. It really brought out his coloring and he looked good in it. He thought so, too. One time he went into the hall to turn on the heat before Mass and accidentally locked himself out of the church – and, hence, the rectory. He called one of the wardens to come and let him back in. He was wearing pink pajamas and his Toronto Maple Leafs slippers. I’m not telling the story nearly as funny as it was.

I wish there was more pink in churches.

In his homily, the priest talked about stillness, about finding that moment of stillness where you can just sit and be with God. Likewise, Evagrios the Solitary, whom I happened to be reading today, says that “the practice of stillness is full of joy and beauty; its yoke is easy and its burden light.” He connects this stillness with asceticism, with charity, with wilderness, with constancy, with rejoicing (which sounds very much like Advent). He also says that, in order to be a space in which a person can really live his life, one's ascetic disciplines must be flexible enough that they can be modified or dispensed with if a person is sick or tired, so that he can return in strength to them. He also says that they should not limit the way a person participates in the lives of others, as for example would be the case if one were invited out to dinner.

In a way, this joy in stillness is exactly what ‘pink Sunday’ is about. A break from those burdensome or difficult aspects of devotional life, a place to stop and just be happy and recapture that stillness, recapture the meaning of all the preparation; a bubble of calm that can be carried out of that day and into the rest of life as the liturgical seasons flow on. A space in which to sit and be, of lightness and joy. In a way leaving the expectation and preparation behind for a while and just living in the simplicity of being, in knowing that in God all is already accomplished, that there is already a place for you and that God welcomes you into it even now, even in the middle of a life not yet fulfilled.

Maybe this is something I should try and take to heart. That I need to accept my own limitations in my prayer life without feeling guilty or ashamed or sad when I can’t accomplish everything I want to do. That I need enough flexibility to be able to live in that joy and stillness instead of always seeking to do something I haven’t had time to do, or obsessing over the ways I have failed. I’m not living a religious life, and that means that I don’t always have the freedom to live a God-centered life in all the ways I feel drawn to do, in all the ways I want to.

Maybe I’m supposed to understand that that’s okay.

I’ll try to work on that.