spiritual disciplines

Seventh Lent: Writing Love from Ashes
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Seventh Lent: Writing Love from Ashes

I wasn’t raised in a faith tradition that celebrated or followed the liturgical calendar save Christmas, Good Friday and Easter. It wasn’t until I attended seminary in my early twenties that I met followers of Jesus that practiced this thing called Lent, rung in by this day they call Ash Wednesday. Here it is again, the day that is a doorway into a foreign spiritual practice that I have organically stretched and grown into like a child pulling on an adult’s sweater. 

I’m still not very mindful of following the church calendar throughout the year, so Lent sneaked up on me again. A Presbyterian friend who is a fellow minister and blogger posted last week about Lent. I groaned, not because his post was lacking but because it was convicting. My mindless wandering through the time-faith continuum always leaves me with less than adequate preparation. It’s always the week or days before that I begin asking myself what I will do to enter the desert with Christ this year, to walk with him on the path to the cross, to prepare myself for the wonder of his resurrection. This is not an easy question to answer – I really need to give myself more space and time to consider this fully.

How will I enter the desert with Christ this year, follow him toward the cross, fully know the sacrifice of his death so that I can wholly celebrate his resurrection?

For life-long Lenters, these forty days are often about fasting, sacrifice, giving-up, repentance. As a Lenten adolescent, I want to live into the practice, rather than follow a set of rules or expectations. In many ways, practicing Lent has become a work of imagination. Rather than being about soul-stripping deprivation, I like to approach Lent with curiosity, looking for what I can learn about life from one (Jesus) who has experienced the fullness of the life-cycle – birth, death, resurrection and life eternal. I approach Lent wanting to open myself to more of God as I empty myself of self-obsession, to have my spirit expanded not crushed or shriveled, to see and feel God create and grow love for the world in me. 

Lent is less about what I do than who I’m becoming. Lent is an opportunity not a rule. Lent is a creative and imaginative act of my freewill not a mindless religious obligation. I practice because I believe it is a tool available to me to build up my faith in God.

This year I reach Ash Wednesday already in a season of deprivation. When I considered how to practice Lent this year, I rejected a lot of ideas. I thought about subtracting bread from my diet and each day reading passages that teach how God sustains us. Out of kindness for my weary soul, I shelved that idea for another year. Finally, this morning, in the eleventh hour – inspiration.

What do I know to be true about God, even in times of deprivation? I know that God is the source of life. God created each of us; he knit us together in our mothers’ wombs. God nurtures us like a breast-feeding mother and we grow content. At the center of God’s character, actions, message – in my interpretation – is love. If I do any good thing or believe any good thing but do not have love, what good am I? To grow more like Christ, I must grow in my capacity to know and give love.

For the next forty days I will read and meditate on passages about God’s love and each day I will write one love letter. I’ll care little about length, style or the delivery method of these letters but focus my attention on expressing love for the recipient. I’m sure I’ll write to family members, dear friends, even to myself. On Sundays I will write my love letter to God. Some of these letters will be easy, my thankfulness for the recipients overflowing onto paper. Others will be excruciatingly difficult, like the letter to my sister-in-law whose deception and abandonment have caused our family so much pain. I’ve started hundreds of letters to her in my heart. I have known and loved her half of my life but now my love is so mixed with pain, anger, betrayal and confusion that words don’t seem to be the right tool to express all that is in me. Smudging ash across a white page seems the most fitting. Regardless, this letter has been burning within me for years. It’s time to write it out. I imagine it will be the most difficult letter of my life. 

I may not send every letter. I may not know how to finish some of them or even where to send them. But I will do my best to learn from and borrow the love of Christ and spread that love along every curve and point in my script.

Learning love. Borrowing love. Spreading love. It’s shaping into a fruitful forty days.

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The Sixth Lent: Musical Abstinence

I’m still a novice at Lent; this is just my 6th season out of 32 years of life.   My first year I gave up sarcasm and exaggeration and learned an important (and humorous) lesson in growing into, rather than jumping into, a new spiritual practice.  Last year, when I prepared for my forty day fast, I dabbled with the idea of giving up music.  I first thought to give it up entirely, but then my body started twitching and my eyes began to sting and, in a gasping moment of reality when my tongue when numb, I realized that giving up music cold turkey might be a bit extreme.

Abstaining from music for four weeks would be a radically ascetic experiment for this melomane.  (That’s French for “music lover” and said with the caressing accent it gives you a sense of my love affair with music.)  Living without music for 960 hours, or 57,600 minutes, or 345,6000 seconds?  That’s like the 4th of July without the block parties, fruit-flag desserts, crepe-papered bicycles and chest-thumping fireworks.  Last year I wimped out and gave up added sugars, which was challenging, but nothing close to giving up my precious music.

2011 was a difficult year because of a sense of vocational stuntedness and a family loss.  2012 hasn’t yet loosened the grip its neighbor held on my heart.  For me, listening to music and singing along is often as cathartic as sipping a cool cup of water in the scorching Phoenix heat or shattering a glass against the hard stones of a fireplace.  But sometimes I abuse music.  I abuse it, and myself, when I use music to tune out the voice of my inner life.  I suspect that in the past year, music has been more of a muffle than a balm.  So, as much as I love music, as much as it gives me joy and energy and a certain dancing-in-my-soul verve, I decided to set it aside for a time.

I don’t want to become a person who claims that God has abandoned me in hard times.  Maybe I’m not hearing God’s voice because it’s hard to hear a whisper through a cotton ball.  Maybe God is offering me sweet melodies of truth and consolation that would bind together the ragged linings of my soul but I’m not listening well.  Maybe I’ve turned music into noise, a distraction, just an excuse not to courageously face the somewhat barren landscape of my life and follow my Savior Jesus as he ventured, alone, without supplies, into the desert.  Maybe the key to hearing God in the desert is clearing away all the distraction and stepping into aloneness with God.

Conviction tells me it’s time to clean out my ears, so I’ve instituted a silent commute for Lent.  For the two, thirty minute trips to and from work each day, there’s no top 40, no cds, no talk radio.  There’s just the sound of my breathing, the rev of my car’s engine, the squeak of breaks and the hum of tires rubbing against the pavement.  Yesterday at an intersection, the service truck next to me was blaring “Low Rider” and before I knew it I was bobbing my head in time and smiling at the driver.  I miss the music that got me merrily home but in the silence I’ve discovered a jam of thoughts and prayers waiting for their right of way.  In just two weeks, I’ve run into a lot of unanswered questions, discovered wounds that need healing, and prayed that God would grant me the senses to see, hear and feel hope for my future.  I’ve realized how self-centered I am and found forgiveness.  And it seems that with each turn of my tires I chant the name Sara – the one who left our family for other happiness.  But mostly, I sit in silence and listen to the sounds of my commute, the beeps, rubbing, the rattles, which remind me that though I am sitting still, I am going somewhere.

This morning in the silence an old chorus popped into my head – “Thou O Lord, art a shield about me; you’re my glory; you’re the lifter of my head.”  I believe those words are true, but I’m not able to feel their truth now.  As I hummed the chorus throughout the day, I stumbled across a thought – maybe it’s not my song to sing; it’s God’s song for me.   I the Lord, art a shield about you, I’m your glory, I’m the lifter of your head.  Okay Lord, I’m listening.  Thanks to the silence.