World Without End
On Lent, tattoos, and infinite games
Today I went to a noontime Ash Wednesday service at the church where I was baptized 20+ years ago. It’s the closest Episcopal church to my home, but when I first started attending St. Paul’s by-the-Lake it was in the mysterious hinterlands of Chicago’s far North Side. Chris, my cute boss at the radio station where I had an internship, invited me to go with him. I said sure. Sure! And the summer between my junior and senior year of college I fell in love with him and the Book of Common Prayer both.
So much of the power of liturgy is in the sense memories. The way familiar words feel in your mouth, the pressure on your kneecaps when you kneel, the sunlight filtering in through panes of stained glass. At St. Paul’s by-the-Lake the smell of incense hangs in the air whether or not a fire has been lit, the carbon copy of countless prayers said and unsaid. The proudly Anglo-Catholic parish is smells and bells and lace and polished brass and thick brocade vestments. Even when it’s been years since I last walked through these heavy red doors, even if I no longer recognize anyone in the pews, even though I chafe at the theological commitments signaled by the church’s insistence on using the 1928 BCP, the soft animal of my body purrs as I slide into a hard walnut pew and arrange my feet under the padded kneeler.
When I first started attending St. Paul’s-by-the-Lake I was a student at a conservative Bible college and the Episcopal Church USA had just ordained its first openly gay bishop. I was skeptical of the denomination, quick to tease Chris about its sordid origin story. I attended as an anthropologist as much as anything until the liturgy got into my bones.
I have one tattoo, three words on my right wrist: world without end. Today I was reminded that I first heard the phrase at St. Paul’s-by-the-Lake.
Before the service, ashes made from branches of palm or other trees which were blessed in the previous year shall be blessed.
The service may begin with the following introit.
Thou hast mercy upon all, O Lord, and abhorrest nothing which thou hast made, and dost overlook the sins of men, that they may repent, and thou sparest them: for thou art the Lord our God. Be merciful unto me, O God, be merciful unto me: for my soul trusteth in thee. Glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Ghost. As it was in the beginning, is now and ever shall be, world without end. Amen.
World without end was a record scratch for me, a lyrical reframe of all the apocalyptic and cultural anxieties of my fundagelical upbringing. Without dismissing this world and its particular concerns, world without end preaches a whole sermon about perspective. Life is what James Carse would call an “infinite game.” In his telling finite players play within boundaries whereas infinite players play with boundaries.”
“Because infinite players prepare themselves to be surprised by the future, they play in complete openness. It is not an openness as in candor, but an openness as in vulnerability. It is not a matter of exposing one's unchanging identity, the true self that has always been, but a way of exposing one's ceaseless growth, the dynamic self that has yet to be.”
(Many thanks for to David and Sarah Dark for pressing Carse’s book into my hands years ago. )
Maybe one way to think about this liturgical season is that Lent is a time to observe our finitude. And Easter is the season to revel in the ways in which Jesus changed the rules of the game and makes it possible for us to keep playing at being human even beyond the grave. Perhaps it’s gauche to invoke Easter on Ash Wednesday. But on the heels (here’s hoping) of a global pandemic and with the specter of nuclear war haunting the horizon, perhaps I am not alone in finding value in putting Lent in perspective this year.
I got my tattoo in the midst of a season of wrenching disappointment that threatened to entirely chew up my sense of what was possible for my life. I had these three words etched into my skin as a reminder that the Christian story is one that honors finitude but is not constrained by it. One that laments death, but also refuses to submit to its logic of scarcity. A story that keeps urging us to grow our capacity for and understanding of love. This finite world is a portal to an infinite game powered by the boundless, sustaining grace of God. And even though it’s a little on the nose, sometimes the red doors of a church sanctuary on the north side of Chicago are a portal. As it was in the beginning, is now and ever shall be. World without end. Amen.
Thanks to you (as for so many things!) we had a season at St Paul's-by-the-Lake that has continued to shape and form our sense of what is, what is possible, and what will be.