Prayers of all sort most
welcomed…(don’t want to limit your wishes and petitions with my biases…larger
entities see way more than me!) --Let me share that again…
Earlier
this week, this came to me in the body of an email. It was from a person who is
walking with a loved one through a pretty scary medical diagnosis and treatment
plan.
The
person’s words articulate for me the purpose of Lent.
Prayer
of all sort – for sure. In Lent we do a lot of praying and confessing.
But
the most Lenten part – I don’t want to limit, with my biases- to discover
brightness in the sadness of Lent, the sadness of circumstance, the deserts of
life, one needs to let go of wants, expectations, desires, convenience,
efficiency, immediacy, answers – and humbly sit in the
circumstance attentively listening, praying, and being present.
There
are larger entities that see way more than we – to be present and in connection
and relationship with all that is without the need to understand, explain, or
justify. This is embracing Lent. Lent is about being open and vulnerable and
trusting that, as the prayer of Julien of Norwich says, All shall be well.
And all shall be well. And all manner of things shall be well.
The
desert. Human beings on their own do not do so well in the desert; whether the
desert is a health crisis, grieving a loss, forced transition, shifting society,
or decaying systems. These desert spaces are uncomfortable, and too often we
mindlessly pray that the roulette wheel of ‘bad news’ will skip our number, so
that life rotates onward, on course, and without interruption.
The
truth that we so voraciously try to push aside is that life is full of
interruption, the uncomfortable, and the chaotic. Human beings try really hard,
we try really hard, to push down our fears and not think about the instability
of world, and even less, admit the instability of our own person.
Believe
it or not, this is what Lent is about. Created by the church for the welfare of
humankind; five weeks are marked every year, as a pit stop in the deserts of
life. The five week pause is a set time and place for people to reflect and
connect with each other -community- God, and themselves; a forced season to
step outside of the ordinary and to find in being vulnerable a love beyond
explanation and a hope deeper than our very depths. To get to a place of love
beyond explanation and a hope deeper than our very depths we have to practice
letting go. Lent rituals, Lent prayer, Lent themes are presented by the church
for the people -for us- to do this hard work. Only then can we journey to what Orthodox
theologian Alexander Schmemmen refers to as a state of ‘bright sadness.’
Bright
sadness. The season of Lent does not shy away from heavy topics – sin, death, the
devil. The church has curated a series of stories from the Bible to be told
each year. The stories are not for the faint of heart – this is not magazine
reading where one can flip through quickly, the stories are the kind that cause
trouble.
Take
the story from Genesis. Interpreters of the Bible have spent much time through
the centuries discussing, debating, and pointing fingers at whose fault it was
that Adam and Eve were kicked out of the garden of Eden. Much theologizing has
and does occur on the theme of who birthed sin into the world. Honestly does it
matter?
This
year thanks to a devotional book I have been reading, I came to the text with a
new perspective. Consider for a moment that the discussion and debate are a
smoke screen set in place as a distraction to keep humans – to keep us- from
taking an honest look at ourselves and our relationships – pinpointing the
separation, the sin in our lives, that has hurt our connection with God,
others, creation, and our inner self. It
is more comfortable to point fingers, especially back to the beginning of time
– putting sin at a distance in someone else’s hands.
It
is this separation that put Eve and Adam out of the garden -the brokenness of
our relationships keeps us out of the garden.
The
garden. Jesus, in his last days, arrives in the garden; the garden of
Gethsemane, not the paradise of Eden, but a place of bright sadness. He gets to
this holy place because he took time to go to the desert. In the desert, in a
Lenten practice, Jesus choose to be vulnerable -to let go by praying and not
limiting the situation to his biases. Jesus humbly wandered in the desert
attentively listening, praying, and being present; speaking to each human
desire as it arose, and remaining present, let them go each in turn---
knowledge, wealth, power --- to move past human desire to fall into a love
beyond explanation and a hope deeper than human depths; a place where one is
fed by angels.
Ronald
Rolheiser, an Oblate of Mary Immaculate wrote:
For
us, Satan and wild animals refer particularly to the chaos inside of us that
normally we either deny or simply refuse to face: our paranoia, our anger, our
jealousies, our distance from others, our fantasies, our grandiosity, our
addictions, our unresolved hurts, our sexual complexity, our incapacity to
really pray, our faith doubts, and our dark secrets.
The
normal ‘food’ that we eat (distractions, busyness, entertainment, ordinary
life) works to shield us from the deeper chaos that lurks beneath the surface
of our lives.
Lent
invites us to stop eating, so to speak, whatever protects us from having to
face the desert that is inside us. It invites us to feel our smallness, to feel
our vulnerability, to feel our fears, and to open ourselves to the chaos of the
desert so that we can finally give the angels a chance to feed us.
-pg. xiii “Rediscovering the
Meaning of Lent and Easter: God For Us, “ 2014 Paraclette Press
Come,
open your heart and rest in the desert.
Come
seek a love beyond explanation and a hope deeper than our depths.
Prayers
of all sort most welcomed…(don’t want to limit your wishes and petitions with
my biases…larger entities see way more than me!)
Thanks
be to God. Amen.
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