The Ides of March and Such

Today is known as The Ides of March, the date when Julius Caesar was  assassinated, in the year 44 before the common era,  by a contingent of his political enemies who were tragically led by his good friend Marcus Junius Brutus the Younger. This day in our Western calendar is a day when the best of this life, a deep and abiding friendship, meets the worst in this life, death by the greedy hand of one's own friend. It is a day when our human condition is front and center, and is shown to be almost more baffling and confusing and convoluted than our wildest imaginations can envision.  
And so today's meditation, on this Ides of March, is offered in remembrance of another such confluence of dichotomous phenomena.  
This year, our Holy Week calendar features Palm Sunday on March 24th, and the feast day on which we celebrate the Annunciation of our Lord Jesus Christ to the Blessed Virgin Mary, which is Monday, March 25th. These two observances could not be stranger bedfellows in the context of Holy Week. One feast celebrates the coming of the New Creation, and the other, it's suffering and death. And even though we know that resurrection is just around the corner, the celebration of God's announcemnet of Jesus' birth coming one day after the human community has sentenced him to death, well, it is almost too much to contemplate or bear. 
But that is how the human condition goes. And that is the terrain through which we walk with God in this this season of Lent.....and this season of  life. So I invite us to spend a few minutes this day with the following poem by the great Anglican Metaphysical Poet and Priest, John Donne, who wrote of this confluence of unthinkable events in 1608.


THE ANNUNCIATION AND PASSION.
by John Donne

TAMELY, frail body, abstain to-day ; to-day
My soul eats twice, Christ hither and away. 
She sees Him man, so like God made in this,
That of them both a circle emblem is,
Whose first and last concur ; this doubtful day
Of feast or fast, Christ came, and went away ; 
She sees Him nothing, twice at once, who's all ;
She sees a cedar plant itself, and fall ;
Her Maker put to making, and the head
Of life at once not yet alive, yet dead ; 
She sees at once the Virgin Mother stay
Reclused at home, public at Golgotha ;
Sad and rejoiced she's seen at once, and seen
At almost fifty, and at scarce fifteen ; 
At once a son is promised her, and gone ;
Gabriell gives Christ to her, He her to John ;
Not fully a mother, she's in orbity ;
At once receiver and the legacy. 
All this, and all between, this day hath shown,
Th' abridgement of Christ's story, which makes one—
As in plain maps, the furthest west is east—
Of th' angels Ave, and Consummatum est. 
How well the Church, God's Court of Faculties,
Deals, in sometimes, and seldom joining these. 
As by the self-fix'd Pole we never do
Direct our course, but the next star thereto,
Which shows where th'other is, and which we say
—Because it strays not far—doth never stray,
So God by His Church, nearest to him, we know,
And stand firm, if we by her motion go.
His Spirit, as His fiery pillar, doth
Lead, and His Church, as cloud ; to one end both. 
This Church by letting those days join, hath shown
Death and conception in mankind is one ;
Or 'twas in Him the same humility,
That He would be a man, and leave to be ;
Or as creation He hath made, as God,
With the last judgment but one period,
His imitating spouse would join in one
Manhood's extremes ; He shall come, He is gone ;
Or as though one blood drop, which thence did fall,
Accepted, would have served, He yet shed all,
So though the least of His pains, deeds, or words,
Would busy a life, she all this day affords.
This treasure then, in gross, my soul, uplay,
And in my life retail it every day. 

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Source:
Donne, John. Poems of John Donne. vol I.
E. K. Chambers, ed.
London: Lawrence & Bullen, 1896. 170-171.

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