I haven’t posted a piece of writing to this site in a while, in a little more than three weeks to be precise, and I have been asking myself why.

Asking why because I didn’t make any decision to stop writing and posting – just found that I wasn’t doing it.

Asking why because the site, in my view, has been a focal point for my writing these past three years.   Sure, there are questions about who is reading it and how, and about whether the ubiquity of Twitter as the conduit to everything else means you might as well tweet your thoughts instead of essaying them.  (The news that Twitter is questioning its own effectiveness suggests that these questions go with the digital territory.)

Asking why because, without fail, I’ve enjoyed writing and posting pieces to the site, and because by now the mental act is habitual, so that short essays take shape in my mind without any effort on my part.  This morning, for example, obituaries on successive days for George Martin and Robert Palladino – one the Beatles’ producer, the other a Trappist calligrapher whose love of beautiful typography was passed on to his student Steve Jobs – prompted a mental mini-essay on the unlikelihood of these two men becoming major figures in the confluence of the arts and technology, an essay that (had I written it) would also have taken into account Google’s home page today, which is dedicated to the theramin, one of the first and most original electric musical instruments.

Asking why because all signs have been that the site fits aptly into the community of thought and feeling that is Georgetown.

So: why?  I didn’t have an answer until I looked at the date of my post recent – now not so recent – post, about a Faith & Culture conversation with David Gregory.  

It was Tuesday, February 9.  It was Fat Tuesday, the day before Ash Wednesday.

In the religion-and-culture field, where I till the soil from time to time, it’s an article of faith that the liturgical calendar is something like a substratum to the ordinary calendar, and that the movement from Annunciation to Christmas and Epiphany to Ash Wednesday to Palm Sunday and Easter to Pentecost and on into ordinary time is a pattern natural to human experience.

I am generally suspicious of such a view.  It’s too easy, too smug; it takes as givens the patterns that must be reinstilled, and then renewed and reinterpreted – reinvented – from one generation to the next.

And yet there it is: as the season of self-emptying and purgation began, I instinctive set aside one of my self-preoccupations without understanding why.

Following Lutheran custom, during Lent J.S. Bach led no “figured music” in the churches where he worked.  One year, he seized the opportunity – seven weeks without a need to compose fresh music for each Sunday – to compose the St. John Passion, truly an amazing Lenten feat.

I wish I could say I have been painting my masterpiece.  I haven’t, quite.  But I have been taking a step in that direction – so I hope, anyway.  

Lewis Hyde in The Gift characterizes the life of an artist in terms of two impulses, or modes, which succeed each other, going in and out of phase: the receptive mode, in which the artist waits to receive the gift of inspiration, and the making mode, in which the artist makes art as “the gift that is given back.”

Usually we think of Advent as the time of waiting, of preparation for the reception of a gift.  But of course the notion of receptive preparation for a gift fits the Lenten season aptly, too – and helps to clarify the purposes of silence and renunciation and reflection that we associate with Lent.  

I hope I am in receptive mode, and not just saying so.  In any case, to see the season in this way, to feel it in this way, has been a gift in itself.

The photograph shows the Moon over Lazio: my home page these past few weeks.