Tuesday: Second Week in Lent Year B

Lent for Everyone
Mark Year B
WEEK 2: TUESDAY...

...I watched the bird take off from the field and, rising quickly into the sky, float and soar on the afternoon breeze. It was free, and expressing that freedom with a kind of light-hearted joy. I wondered, reading this story at the same time, what it would look like if that bird had been tied up, close to the ground, so that every time it wanted to fly free it found it was unable to do so. Even with the brain of a bird, such a poor creature would, we will suppose, be frustrated to the point of despair.

Now consider this woman who had suffered for twelve years from internal bleeding. She will, almost certainly, have been a family person; almost all women in that world were married, and most were mothers. But she won’t have been free to be the wife and mother she would naturally have wanted. The bleeding will have been exhausting in itself, debilitating, sapping her energy all the time. But, far worse than that, she will have been constrained and constricted by a thousand necessary restrictions. These were not just insensitive or demeaning taboos. Good medical policy, granted what was known about at the time, would demand that such a person avoid the risk of infecting others...

Taken from Lent for Everyone Mark Year B by Tom Wright