Shriving

This picture from the wonderful (if rather mad) My Book of the Church's Year by Enid Chadwick illustrates the fact that we're about to enter my least favourite time of the year, the forty days' privation and increased workload of Lent. I wonder whether the Cathedral will offer confessions this holy season or whether they will just not respond to my enquiries again.

Anyway. Before all that excitement happens we have Shrove Tuesday and later today I will be leading the Shriving Service at the Town Pancake Race. I have no idea what a Shriving Service involves, apart from, in broad terms, shriving, although searches on the interweb reveal that something of the kind happens in Olney, Bucks, in quite a big way each year, there isn't any clear idea of what the liturgy might include. So, in a manner which is theoretically very un-Anglo-Catholic but in fact pretty typical, I've made it all up.

Yesterday in the spirit of the season our Lay Reader said very seriously that she wanted to speak to me, and apologised for making some thoughtless and vaguely critical remark a few days ago. I couldn't even remember it, which perhaps shows that I am more thick-skinned than I sometimes imagine. We are enjoined as Christians to forgive those who sin against us, but what if we don't recognise those failures as sins? I don't think it makes a difference. I think I was right not just to brush the apology aside with a wave of the hand and say it didn't matter, but accept it as a movement of the Holy Spirit. It clearly meant a lot to her, even if the remark hadn't hurt me in the way she feared it had. Even if I don't feel I have anything to forgive, God does, and so the willingness in one soul to repent and confess is something to give thanks for.