Director of Anglican Identity - The Reverend Dr Eleanor O'Donnell
It has been a joy to be welcomed back into the Archdiocese of Perth to take up the role of Director of Anglican Identity for the ASC. There have been many factors swirling around in the process of getting to the point of being here and ‘on the job’, not least coming to terms with the time difference, the temperature, the need to find and set up a home base, access a different computer system, and navigate my way to schools new to me in Western Australia and Victoria/NSW.
It has been a juxtaposition of old and new experiences: a little de ja vu, and a definite sense of fresh air and expanded horizons. All of which has conspired to set up the expectation that I’ll experience even the very familiar in unfamiliar ways over the next weeks and months. Then along comes Ash Wednesday on Valentine’s Day – the perfect example of the unfamiliar familiar. I felt a level of sympathy with those who sought advice from the Church on whether chocolates, champagne, caviar, and celebratory carnations were too great a distraction to entertain on a day when our mortality is front and centre and repentance rightly the order of the day.
The last time Ash Wednesday and Valentine’s Day coincided was 2018, recent times indeed. Yet this collision of romantic love and faith-filled repentance happened only three times last century – in 1923, 1934, and 1945. If you are keen for another Ash Valentine Wednesday, it will happen again in 2029 for the final time this century. Both Ash Wednesday and Valentine’s Day have overt Christian roots, although it is fair to say that Ash Wednesday is at the heartland of Christian practice and Valentine’s Day has become decidedly peripheral. Particularly as the background to Valentine’s Day is a combination of at least three overlapping stories of Valentine – potentially a priest, a soldier, a lover (or all three) – alongside fertility rituals of ancient Rome and love letters attributed to English poets of the Middle Ages. A heady cocktail indeed!
It occurs to me that the juxtaposition of time and place, old and new, faith-filled and secular that have been writ large for me in the last few weeks is the substance of much of our being in contemporary times. For we all have as much access to global and national as we do local concerns via our newsfeeds and online interactions.
We can all hop between the historical and the innovative at will, choosing our place of comfort within that spectrum. We can all align or separate our faith traditions with and from our prevailing culture and context too, depending on our preferences. With all this in mind, now that we are into the season of Lent, rather than seeking to block the competition from the times and the temperature (theological and otherwise), I’m looking to embrace the juxtaposition.
As I walk an identifiably Anglican journey through Lent, I’ll ensure my backpack contains the means to keep time locally and further afield, to take the temperature and reduce the heat or the chill according to need, to navigate well, and to carry the older tradition with me even as I embrace the new. In this way, I’m expecting this year’s Lenten journey to be both interesting and invigorating, especially as it is undertaken in such good company.
