Captain Yips: Making Room in Our Imaginations for God

This meditation for Shrove Tuesday is the first entry in the Anglican Bloggers Lenten Collaboration series of daily devotionals that will be posted on Lent & Beyond throughout Lent. Today’s entry is by guest blogger Captain Yips.——

Shrovetide
Ash Wednesday and Lent are upon us. It’s Fat Tuesday, Mardi Gras, and although our culture has mostly turned from the ascetic deprivations of Lent, we’ve kept the Tuesday blow-out. We won’t fast on Wednesday, but we’ll sure eat and drink on Tuesday.

There’s a meteorological Lent, too. Although we’re in a transitional period as daylight increases daily, Ash Wednesday is in my mind always a grey, austere day, a day of thin, watery light, damp chill, and a certain lack of vigor. A fragment of a poem I wrote long ago always bubbles up, though the rest is long forgotten:

We meet in small company in the grey morning,
to share our little meal of bread and wine.

The rest at Lent and Beyond