Passiontide

Today is Passion Sunday and as you look around Church you will see that many of our decorations are now covered. For in these last two weeks of Lent we enter a deeper stage of our pilgrimage, traditionally known as Passiontide.

Passion as a deep, driving and unsettling expression of love is an evocative word which we can find in the tabloid press as often as in a Church news sheet. Sometimes it is hard to connect these two uses and in many ways it seems safer to keep ‘unruly passions’ a long way from the ‘Passion of our Lord’. As we approach Easter, however, and the supreme example of God’s love, such neat distinctions can be hard to maintain. Indeed some of our most profound Christian mystics and poets, such as John Donne, see no distinction at all.

Batter my heart, three-person'd God, for you
As yet but knock, breathe, shine, and seek to mend;
That I may rise and stand, o'erthrow me, and bend
Your force to break, blow, burn, and make me new.
I, like an usurp'd town to'another due,
Labor to'admit you, but oh, to no end;
Reason, your viceroy in me, me should defend,
But is captiv'd, and proves weak or untrue.
Yet dearly'I love you, and would be lov'd fain,
But am betroth'd unto your enemy;
Divorce me,'untie or break that knot again,
Take me to you, imprison me, for I,
Except you'enthrall me, never shall be free,
Nor ever chaste, except you ravish me.