One dummy postage stamp toward the end of a coil had the phrase “Time to Reorder.”

How appropriate for this current liturgical season of Lent, geared as it is to our communal and personal relationship with God!

Preparing to receive or renew our baptism, we recall how we didn’t arrive here unaccompanied, nor ought we persevere through or depart from this life unaccompanied. Enter the first key Lenten figure of Noah.

Perhaps our familiarity with Noah abides in the ark he built to house his family along with pairs of everything from cows to ostriches to, I guess, for whatever reason, mosquitoes.

We may think, too, of the rainbow that God set in the sky to remind Noah of God’s covenant promise to save and never to destroy what He has made.

The rainbow is an ongoing natural but intangible phenomenon; the ark would have been a tangible fabrication of pre-existing trees.

We have seen rainbows, and some archaeologists might claim to have seen remnants of the ark. However considerable their value in this prehistoric account, the element that is both tangible and unmistakably God-given is water, to which ark and bow their existence owe.

Water is a powerhouse, as much a part of living things as carbon; its volume in a given space can destroy as easily as it can preserve. Today, in its crystalline form, we might consider it a nice nuisance.

In his first epistle (3:18-22), Saint Peter praised water’s purifying quality, whereby it removes not only dirt but sin and its accompanying guilt. Christ lends to an already strong element a strength and a meaning it otherwise couldn’t have.

The tale of the ark points to the Church - both a building and its inhabitants - which gives the ark, an already strong element, a strength and a meaning it otherwise couldn’t have.

The new ark bears within itself the new seeds and embryos of God’s Kingdom, those He plants in all parts of the earth to once again, and like never before, make it fruitful. This “ark” - this sacred community - God made for shelter, but not for isolation.

That rainbow also applies to the disciple waist-deep in another Lent, a period of purification and preparation. I’m sure I learned this stuff years ago, but I donate a little bit to Wikipedia to see it on demand: rainbows are “caused by refraction, internal reflection and dispersion of light in water droplets resulting in a continuous spectrum of light appearing in the sky,” taking “the form of a multicolored circular arc.”

The light of Christ, moving through the baptismal waters, causes refraction - bending, conversion, change; internal reflection - the examination that a conscience needs if it wants to become clear; and dispersion - spreading the Good News of God’s covenant promise of salvation.

What about the arc (here, a-r-c not a-r-k)?

Again, to Wikipedia: “Rainbows caused by sunlight always appear ... directly opposite the sun,” as if to show off its origin. Like the famous coat of Joseph, the rainbow contains within itself all the possibilities of color; to quote in the words of Hopkins, “Christ plays in ten thousand places,” all over space and time - seemingly numberless expressions of His Kingdom within us and every created reality.

The lovely visible creation points to hidden heaven, where with His servant “angels, authorities, and powers” God abides (cf. 1 Peter 3:22).

We wait in joyful hope for the promise fulfilled: to be sprung from our sturdy ecclesial ark into a world much in need of color and life.

But one church service isn’t enough, any more than one “I love you,” so we return, many more times, and there’s always room for more animals.