Mirror in Mirror
A Lenten Meditation - Part 5
Day fifteen. And I’m stepping back from Godspell for the moment .
There was a season when Lent began with a box set.
Nine discs. Arvo Pärt: The Collection. Imported from a small UK bookstore. A dear friend, Will, gave it to me for Christmas, and I treated it like something monastic; each CD opened carefully, returned gently, slid back into its case as if sound could bruise.
It was stolen during a break-in.
I never recovered it.
For years, the loss felt disproportionate. It was only music. But it wasn’t only music. It was a ritual. It was the sound of Lent for me. Sparse. Spacious. Unhurried.
“Spiegel im Spiegel.” Mirror in mirror.
A simple ascending line for violin (or cello, my favorite ) and piano. No crescendo. No persuasion. Just return. Return. Return.
The piece found a wider audience when it played during the final episode of The Good Place. One of the characters had completed everything he could within the universe. He had learned what he needed to learn. He was ready to walk through the door of no return. His beloved was not finished yet.
The music did not swell. It did not argue. It only accompanied.
He stepped through.
No spectacle. No fireworks. Just a quiet willingness. The wave returning to the ocean.
I envied the character’s certainty.
Not his exit, but his certainty.
The calm conviction that he was complete.
And I questioned whether such certainty is even possible.
Even saints die mid-sentence.
Lives rarely resolve into tidy conclusions. We do not often reach the moment when every regret has been metabolized, every wound integrated, every loose end tidied up. We stop somewhere in the middle of all the learning.
After Jesus’ baptism in the Jordan, a voice declared, “You are my beloved Son; with you I am well pleased.” That naming came before the desert. Before the hunger. Before the temptations. Before any public work.
Then the Spirit drove Him into the wilderness.
Driven. Not escorted. Not cushioned.
Beloved came first. The wilderness second.
The temptations did not target logistics. They targeted identity.
“If you are…”
The desert did not give Him a clean narrative. It clarified who He was without applause, without proof, without spectacle.
We tend to prefer the spectacle.
It is easier to turn Him into a belief system than to follow Him into the desert.
Easier to sing about Him once a week than to live the way He lived.
Easier to dust a cross than to shoulder one.
Safer to celebrate holy days than to confront the ways we benefit from injustice or hide behind the performance.
We prefer admiration to imitation.
He did not invite admiration.
He invited participation.
He said, “Take up your cross.”
And I have preferred admiration to imitation more often than I want to admit.
What I envied in that doorway scene was not transcendence. It was the finality. The feeling that everything had cohered. That the work was finished.
But perhaps narrative certainty is only ever an illusion.
Perhaps what we are offered instead is something quieter: the steady naming of belovedness in the middle of incompletion.
Lent exposes how much I am waiting to feel finished before allowing myself peace. How much I believe rest must be earned through integration. How often I try to earn belovedness, instead of inhabiting it.
The music does not rush me there.
It holds the note.
I lost the physical box, so I stream it now. The notes remain. The violin still resonates in the chest. On cello, it still breaks something open. The ritual only changed shape, while the sound endured.
Presence shifted form.
Completion did not arrive.
Nine hours of Pärt is not dramatic. It is disciplined spaciousness. It does not fix grief. It does not resolve longing. It does not certify readiness. It simply stays.
You are Mirror in mirror.
Maybe peace is spoken before the desert begins.
Perhaps faithfulness matters more than certainty.
On day fifteen of Lent, I am not finished. I am not even certain I’m capable of being so.
The music just keeps playing. And I keep listening.
Trying to remember: Beloved first. Wilderness second.
And to keep walking.
TW
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