Liza Field

Liza Field's column appears twice a month in Extra.

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Mardi Gras and Ash Wednesday, heralding the old penitential season of Lent, arrive early this year-just one faded, wind-whistling, February-bare week after Valentines.

This juxtaposition offers a mind-stirring contrast, a stark edge of change from the Valentine hearts and perfumes to ashes on the head and the stripped-down, unfrilly journey of pilgrims on foot.

It is a good reminder of the depth of love, which evokes from a person's being not just joy and gladness, but sorrow and grief — that dark, rich, difficult underside of love never featured in pretty Valentine sale fliers.

It's a contrast that stretches the human experience from its heights to its deep valleys, expressing more accurately the true stature and vastness of the human soul, of love, even of this universe that is our composition and our home.

Empty surfaces

That immensity gets emphasized with an unusual concurrence, this year, as Ash Wednesday not only trails Valentines, but happens to fall on an odd old holy day called the "Chair of St. Peter."

This obscure saint's day officially honors the death of St. Peter. But it was rooted in an ancient Roman feast, lodged in late February, when families would remember dead kinfolk and friends by bringing empty chairs to the table. Along with these vacant chairs, of course, came a fresh visit from that guest called "sorrow."

Now here would be an archaic notion indeed, in our Western culture today, when people aren't supposed to feel sorrow — much less welcome it with intentional hospitality, nor draw up around themselves empty chairs — if any surface in life can be kept empty at all.

Yet reality and our cultural mind-set are often at odds. A simple glance at "what is" would indicate that chairs warm and full today — those of people familiar to us, people we love, those we dislike, and the chairs we ourselves occupy — will be cool and vacant soon enough.

This past year, I've pondered the circumstance of many noble souls I know with chairs recently emptied around them.

Litt, Mary Rosser, David, Larry, Jana, Joe, Anne, Ron, Alan, Harriet, Charlie, Margaret, Belle and Jack — each of these heroes I know has recently had to open arms wide to the guest of sorrow, each having bade farewell to a longtime husband, wife, mother, father or a grown child in the springtime of life.

Vacancies

These pilgrims are passing through "that lonesome valley," as the Carter Family sang, on that ancient road "everybody's got to walk" and "walk it by their selves."

This Lenten valley of a journey — the invisible undersides of love, represented less by Valentines decor and rosebuds than by ashes and many dark layers of compost — has a purging effect. Not only is a chair left emptied, but also part of oneself.

All kinds of old familiar furniture gets stripped down — curtains too, closet-loads of storage. Old certainties, illusions, closed doors, trivialities and former concerns — all get blown through by the force of the fresh, strong wind of this storm that bares more than the seat of a chair.

For those not in such a stormy segment of their life's trail, it can be easier to deny loss and let diversions offer distraction from the emptying chairs around us. Who wants to absorb the sufferings of East Africans, the Greeks, Europeans and Syrians, even though what they are facing is our own collective fate?

Who wants to see the ongoing, permanent exodus from Earth of entire wild species, whose 65 million years of serving life has allowed our own species to flourish? We could stop eradicating them, but it would require seeing the profundity of this loss.

Edge of our seats

"We like to look the other way, and convince ourselves that what we are passing through is other than what it is," said Howard Thurman, the great American philosopher, theologian and civil rights visionary. "By postponing the facing of the fact, we think we can get rid of the fact."

Thurman — who was intimate with sorrow and human turmoil — perceived that we must "see the event" of loss. We must pull up to the supper-table these empty chairs, not just because they are real, but because particular reality — when received — opens the way to universal reality.

We can instead, Thurman cautioned, grow inhospitable to loss, and "wallow in self-pity and self-judgment."

"But there is a far more creative way. We can give ... our consent. We can say 'Yes, I go along with this. I will not push against it, but give my consent, my support to these ravages.'

"And I do this, then the ravages become an agent that is vehicular for my ends. The event becomes my servant, rather than my enemy. It may even become integral to my interpretation of the meaning of life — and of the goodness of God."

Liza Field's column runs every other Saturday in Extra.