A Daily Lent

Dinnerless Camels Saturday after the Resurrection – April 18, 2020 Transformation does not happen by an act of the will. Responding to an altar call is important for some, but is certainly not the end as much as a new beginning. Benchmark life-events may help nurture us, but one-time events do not have the force to shift the deeply ingrained patterns within us. There are no quick fixes in the Christian spiritual life, no short-cuts to an adult spirituality. Rather, we must take care to feed the inner self, to nourish the soul, to give care to that which is at our center, for this inner self will emerge in the world as a transforming presence. We cannot expect ourselves to live differently in the world if we do not attend to this inward dimension of life. For example, in order not to be overwhelmed by a global pandemic, we must be intentional about ingesting spiritual nourishment that will give us resources to keep us from being overwhelmed by the pandemic flood. We have to ea

Original Purpose Friday after the Resurrection – April 17, 2020 Each person has a different charism, a different grace given by God to animate our lives. Think of this charism or grace as your original purpose, the design for your creation, your truest vocation. Considering your charism or unique grace may not lead you to fame or financial security, but it will enable you to fill out the purpose for which you were created. Your calling in life is not to be like anyone else, but to be fully yourself, fully the person you were intended to be. At the end of the excerpt below, Underhill says, “All have access to direct sources of spiritual strength in prayer, quietude, communion, and spiritual reading and will not do their best work without these things.” Indeed, prayer, quietude, communion, and spiritual reading are but a few of the ways we begin to come to a sense of our original purpose, our most authentic vocation. Now the three-fold Ignatian question: “What have I done

The Sunshine School of Piety Thursday after the Resurrection – April 16, 2020 The popular prophets of contemporary culture are not those who tell the truth – which is the hallmark of a true prophet – but those who say what their followers want to hear. Religious leaders, political leaders, leaders of commerce . . . most anyone can fall into this kind of cheerleading . . . another version of dressing up a pig in lipstick. We notice this all around us, even in the midst of a global pandemic . . . some who say things are not really that bad (try selling that to 28,593 families in the United States and 138,487 families around the world who have lost loved ones to COVID-19) or who advocate sacrificing people’s health and lives for the good of economic factors (Capitalism as the greatest good!). In the excerpt below, Evelyn Underhill uses the ominous phrase, “ the sunshine school of piety ,” calling it a “charmingly optimistic outlook.” How apropos is that to our current times? G

The Long Way Home Wednesday after the Resurrection – April 15, 2020 Spiritual growth does not come in a moment . . . in a flash of insight . . . or by responding to an altar call . . . or in an inspiring conference . . . or even in an act of kindness that creates good feelings within us. Spiritual growth is a long, long journey. We grow day-by-day, moment-by-moment, the slow accumulation of long-term openness to God’s work within us. I’ve known persons who expected transformation to come in a flash, and who quickly grew frustrated when they did not get the immediate results they expected. The spiritual life is a journey of our entire lifetime. We never come to the end of it. This is the work God is doing within us slowly, moment-by-moment. In the excerpt below, Evelyn Underhill talks about spiritual growth. We talked first of growth and then of service, but we must not divide them too sharply, for the two go together from the beginning. In a good nursery, children are ta

The Stillpoint Within Tuesday after the Resurrection – April 14, 2020 We are challenged, currently, to be creative, to find different ways to love people. Often, since we have been distanced from one another by the coronavirus threat, we have been told that for right now, we best love people by staying away from them. (And all the introverts say, “I’ve been telling you this for years!”) We make phone calls . . . we use FaceTime . . . try to serve, while maintaining proper distancing. And we pray. We pray for people, if only by whispering the names of those we know who are in need . . . speaking aloud the names of hospitals . . . saying the names of cities and towns that are overwhelmed . . . We meditate . . . we find some contemplative practice to keep us centered and anchored . . . we quietly write poetry . . . we take out a sketchpad and draw or use pastels to doodle or splash some watercolors on a page . . . we regularly drop anchor through a meditative prayer practice (

The Swinging Pendulum Monday after the Resurrection – April 13, 2020 During these days of physical distancing in public and separating ourselves from others in the run of daily life, we can feel out of balance. I know there are mental health concerns related to being socially apart from others over an extended period of time. But also as I hear more and more about how uncomfortable people are over the upset of routines and the forced aloneness of staying at home, I wonder if these days of enforced-slowing-down are not a corrective to our overly busy, frantic lives. I’ve often thought that when our lives are out of balance, when the pendulum has swung too far in one direction or another for us, the corrective sometimes comes in an exaggerated swing back in the other direction. An exaggerated swing that seems excessive may serve only to bring us back to the center. Evelyn Underhill quotes the 14th century Flemish mystic, Jan van Ruysbroeck: Ministering to the world without i

The Pattern Includes Resurrection Resurrection Sunday – April 12, 2020 Resurrection follows death. Every time. It is the immutable, God-given pattern for all of life. Death is not the end. Life is the end. In John 11, Martha, the sister of Mary and Lazarus, goes through a litany of titles for Jesus. Jesus tells her straight-out that he is the resurrection and the life. Then he asks, “Do you believe this ?” He is not asking if she believes in resurrection as an idea or as a theological proposition. He is asking if she believes that resurrection and life are God’s established pattern for the world. Affirming Jesus’ resurrection is not enough. Rather are you willing to enter into this rhythm of birth, life, death, and new life for yourself? This is not only new life. It is also real love. English mystic Evelyn Underhill wrote a great deal about spirituality in the last century. She taught both significant religious leaders and ordinary lay persons with a simplicity that I find c

Rejoicing in Difficulties Holy Saturday – April 11, 2020 What does it mean to “rejoice in difficulties,” as Brother Lawrence suggests below? That may sound like good counsel in normal times – theologizing when life is more or less ordinary is much different than when we are actually in the midst of the storm! – but in days when we are forced to endure the disruption of daily routines, threats to our relationships, and uncertainty about the future, rejoicing sounds like a long-shot (thank you, coronavirus!). To be sure, it is not our first reaction to our situation. But rejoicing takes a longer view, sees through the immediacy of the current reality, notices the nuances and opportunities that arise when times are tough, and is not limited to what the world looks like in the current moment. Brother Lawrence says we should “ rejoice in our difficulties. ” The Apostle Paul says, “ Rejoice in the Lord always, again I will say, ‘Rejoice! ’” Today is Holy Saturday. It is a day of

Ordinary Work Good Friday – April 10, 2020 Brother Lawrence communicated with God by going about his ordinary work. For most of us, our “ordinary work” has changed in recent weeks. For Brother Lawrence, ordinary work meant working in the monastery kitchen and repairing shoes in the monastery cobbler shop. For us, “ordinary work” is very different. But this monk’s emphasis remains the same. Whatever we do, God is our center. God is the focus of who we are and what we do. This takes our eyes off preoccupation with the situation around us or off trying to please those around us. When we do our work in this way, we truly do “ pray always ,” as Paul suggested in 1 Thess. 5:17. You cannot “ pray continually ” or “ pray without ceasing ” if prayer is nonstop talking or conversation. But Brother Lawrence discovered the key to continual communion with God. Do everything you do in conscious contact with God. He thought it was a shame that some people pursued certain activities (whi

Mandate to Love Maundy Thursday – April 9, 2020 Maundy Thursday – or Holy Thursday – remembers Jesus’ Last Supper with his disciples in the Upper Room. The word Maundy is an Anglo-French word derived from the Latin mandatum . In mandatum you see the root for “mandate,” thus the word typically means “commandment.” The word, then, refers to the new commandment Jesus gives his disciples during the Last Supper in the Upper Room: “ A new command I give you: Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another .” (John 13:34). In these days of physical distancing, when we are separated from other people and from places that comfort us, Jesus’ words to his disciples at the Last Supper present their own challenge. “ Love one another ,” and, “ As I have loved you, so you must love one another ,” yet we are physical apart from those who typically make up our world. Put us in the company of others, and we can come up with ways to love one another. But separate us, ask us

The Really Real Is Deeper Than Your Thoughts Wednesday of Holy Week -- April 8, 2020 In 1637, French philosopher Rene Descartes wrote, “ je pense, donc je suis ,” which has been translated, “I think, therefore I am.” Later, in another philosophical work, he translated the phrase into Latin: cogito, ergo sum . In my limited studies through the years, I’ve learned that the phrase provided guidance for the Enlightenment. The phrase not only elevated the human capacity to think and formulate ideas, it advocated that thinking is the core aspect of our humanity. This is our essence, so to speak, the core of what it means to be human. Our being is determined by our capacity to think. So in the centuries since Descartes, we have been enamored with our thoughts, with our capacity to think and reason. These are not unimportant realities, by the way, but are crucial to our progress as humans, crucial to our ongoing becoming. Ideas and thoughts lead us to understand better how to respond t

Centered in Love Tuesday of Holy Week – April 7, 2020 It seems as if no one has been unaffected by the coronavirus, as well as by the many advisories and precautions under which we live. Information changes daily. Our lives are consumed with numbers, bar graphs, and maps color-coded by hotspot areas. Some of us want to gather all the information we can possible take in . . . while others of us just want to keep our heads down and wait for the virus to go away. For six weeks or so, I’ve felt the need to drop anchor daily and to stay intentionally centered in love. There is so much that is uncertain, so much that tempts toward fear, so much that isolates . . . to stay centered in love seems essential to me. I rehearse how I have noticed God’s love alive in the world. I celebrate the creative expressions of love I notice amidst the difficulties of physical distancing. I meditate on love as an active force in the world, not merely as a word, an idea, or a feeling. Brother L

Grounded Life Monday of Holy Week – April 6, 2020 The heart of spirituality is attentiveness and awareness. These are the attributes most of us need to develop in order to live more deeply, in a more grounded way. Those qualities are needed more today than ever. The entire world is in a panic. Fear is common. Love is emerging slowly. The world needs persons who not only follow local, state, and national mandates, but even more, persons who are attentive and aware, persons who are alert to the underground movements of God in the midst of the threats that surround us. The world needs persons who are tethered to God with a bond that cannot be broken. The world needs persons who are centered and anchored. Read this excerpt from Brother Lawrence for our reading today. In the beginning, Brother Lawrence declared that a little effort was needed to form the habit of continuously conversing with God, telling Him everything that was happening. But after a little careful practice,

Practice God’s Presence during Holy Week Palm Sunday – April 5, 2020 On Palm Sunday we remember that Jesus rode into Jerusalem to begin the last week of his life. He must have looked triumphant as people hailed him “King!” It was a reception that could have led to a coronation; yet, the reality did not match the appearance. He was moving not toward an earthly throne, but toward a cross. Progress in the spiritual life is difficult to measure. The usual tracks and markers don’t work. Appearance doesn’t always match reality. Movement takes place slowly, over time, as we give greater attentiveness to the presence of God within us, to those around us, and to the created world in which we live. For some people, that attentiveness comes naturally in the created world. Brilliant sunsets, vast sandy beaches, and mountain vistas consistently make it onto our lists of ways we sense our connection to God. They bring us to awe and wonder. Others find their connection to God through other

Finding a Way in the Desert Saturday of the Fifth Week of Lent – April 4, 2020 Cummings’ words below are hard to accept. Western Christians, including contemplatives, are more often than not shaped more by culture and prevailing norms than we are by scripture and our mystical/contemplative Christian tradition. Even my labeling, this week in these blog posts, of the current COVID-19 crisis as a “ desert experience ” to some extent adopts a cultural understanding of the situation. After all, we are fond of naming things, and most every name for something, someone, or some experience carries with it some inherent judgements. And the words “desert experience” suggest something harsh or to be avoided, at least for most of us. This is not to deny that the threat around us currently is real, nor am I suggesting that we not approach it with sobriety. Most certainly we should treat these days seriously. But I sense that much of our anxiety and desert feelings stem not only from the

Is God Absent? Friday of the Fifth Week of Lent – April 3, 2020 During the current moment’s COVID-19-induced alteration of rhythms and life-practices, with the onset of fear and uncertainty, I’m hearing people talk about God’s apparent absence. “ Where is God now? ” “ How could God allow this pandemic? ” “ Why doesn’t God do something? ” All are legitimate questions, probably ones that have crossed all our minds at some point, a quick, fleeting thought. Perhaps those expressions are healthy in a time like this. I know they certainly don’t shake God. In fact, I’m confident they say more about us than they say about God. You’ve heard people say, perhaps, “God showed up in this situation or in that event!” We have our own notions of how God is present, sometimes measured by some external results that come from the event, or sometimes by our own goose-bumpy feelings about the situation. Not to completely discredit any of that, but God is bigger than all those feelings or ta

Trusting God in the Desert Thursday of the Fifth Week of Lent – April 2, 2020 In exploring the desert experience this week, we have drawn parallels between the desert and where we find ourselves in dealing with COVID-19 . . . physical distanced and separated from others, with altered routines, and with many of our usual coping strategies no longer available to us. We’ve talked about our tendency to seek an escape from the difficulty that is right before us. The fight or flight syndrome is real . . . right now, flight is not an option . . . while our best fight against this enemy is to stay home and do nothing that feels productive. Psychologists talks about escapism as a desire or behavior to ignore, evade, or avoid reality. Some of our escapism takes the form of some physical action . . . we go on a shopping spree, we travel, we drink excessively . . . we actually DO something to ignore, evade, or avoid reality. Some of our escapism is mental or emotional . . . we withdra

From Resistance to Compassion Wednesday of the Fifth Week of Lent – April 1, 2020 We naturally respond to difficult days by resisting them . . . we push against them, run from them, or distract ourselves in the midst of them. But the desert does not budge against our resistance. It is one thing to resist a highly contagious virus, a needed thing. But to resist the days within the desert means that we don’t take time or energy to live fully the days. I try to regularly check in with myself when I’m in the desert – and these days, we’re all in the desert. • What does it feel like to be me today? • What or who has God brought into my life? And how shall I love them? • What opportunities are arising in the desert that would not ordinarily present themselves? • How can I support or care for others from my physical distance from them? • How is God inviting me to offer my life for the healing and good of the world? I find that when I check in with myself regularly when I’m in

Be Present to the Desert Tuesday of the Fifth Week of Lent – March 31, 2020 The desert feels arid, uncomfortable. We wish we could be somewhere else. We long for life to be different. And this is exactly where we find ourselves during these days . . . in this desert we call coronavirus, physical distancing, and lockdown. We want to run, to get away . . . we want things to be the way they used to be . . . we distract ourselves to keep the daily news at arm’s length. In short, we find different ways dream of escaping the desert. This desire to escape is not unique to our time in the desert. In ordinary life, we can tend towards escape, as well. But whether it happens in the desert or in normal, everyday life, our desire to escape essentially represents our resistance to the place we are at that moment. This is a continual temptation in the spiritual life . . . to resist the present by fleeing to the past or running off to the future. Simply put, this posture means we are not

God in the Desert Monday of the Fifth Week of Lent – March 30, 2020 Dealing with the coronavirus pandemic seems to be all that is on anyone’s mind at the moment. We are experiencing a sobering moment in time. Where is God in this moment? Where is God in any desert experience? It is one thing to affirm in normal times that God is present always and everywhere. In these edge experiences that press hard on us, though, we may find that our usual felt experience of God is missing. We don’t have the same sense of God as we ordinarily do. Often we find that what Cummings calls, “the purifying action of the desert experience” centers around our notions of God. In other words, the expectations and beliefs we have built up around God – who God is, how God is, where God is, and so on – in ordinary days gets tested, even purified, and the desert experience presses hard on those assumptions. In fact, a shift in our image of God may very well be what comes from a desert experience such as th

We Are in the Desert Sunday of the Fifth Week of Lent – March 29, 2020 The entire contemporary world has been thrown into an experience of desert. All our usual norms and routines have been upended by a highly infectious virus. We are in uncharted territory, as “experts” remind us day by day, trying to stay true to best practices, and yet on ground that is unfamiliar – and highly uncomfortable – for most all of us. That we are dealing with the coronavirus pandemic during Lent is its own irony – or the mark of God’s mysterious provision! Someone texted me yesterday to say, “ This is the lentiest Lent I’ve ever lented .” The season of Lent actually parallels the 40 days spent by Jesus in the desert (Mt. 4:1 – 11) after his baptism in the Jordan River. The days of fasting and facing the temptations of the adversary prepared him for the onset of his ministry and confirmed the word he heard at his baptism: “ This is my Son, whom I love; with him I am well pleased ,” (Mt. 3:17). As

Christ at the Center Saturday of the Fourth Week of Lent – March 28, 2020 The first understanding in Christian spirituality is that God is the center of life, the gravitational pull that holds all things in orbit. I am not the center. You are not the center. My family is not the center. My country is not the center. The coronavirus is not the center. The government is not the center. The Church is not the center. Our faith is not the center. The Bible is not the center. Only God is the center of life. To orbit around anything or anyone other than God is to place faith in false gods. Idolatry is the Old Testament word for it. Esther de Waal has some thoughts about Christ at the center of life. If I am to put Christ at the centre, as St. Benedict would have me to, that then displaces me from the centre. Perhaps I had not noticed how subtle that temptation was, that insidious danger of putting myself at the centre so that the emphasis was on me – me serving God, me tr

The Subtle Temptation to Self-Fascination Friday of the Fourth Week of Lent – March 27, 2020 In times of crisis, when the abnormal is the new normal, we can be tempted to look after our own self and those close to us, to the exclusion of “others.” Hoarding goods – so I have more than enough, whether you have enough or not – is simply one expression of the human desire to preserve self. I imagine we have all felt the urge to “look out for number one” as the coronavirus threat has grown. To be fully human means not to be invested solely in self-interest. The fully human life sees oneself in the context of the human family. We live in a web of relationships that reach much farther than we can see. We have responsibilities not just for ourselves and our near circle of relationships . . . we share responsibility for one another. These are Esther de Waal’s words: But these vows also carry an even greater significance. While they help me to be human they also at the same time p

Listening As Openness and Willingness Thursday of the Fourth Week of Lent – March 26, 2020 Benedict of Nursia wrote a guide for persons who sought to live in community out of a common desire to orient life around God. That guide is called The Rule of Benedict. And the “vows” we have explored this week are all integral to Benedictine spirituality. The Benedictine vow of stability means that we stand still and attend to who we are in this moment. We intentionally nourish the soul, we tend to the fires of the inner life. We do not move at such a frantic pace that we cease to know ourselves. Be still. The vow of continual conversion means that we are always journeying on. God is continually forming us, shaping us as the people God created us to be. We continue to journey, to explore, and to make new discoveries, both in the outer world and in the our own inner world. We are still moving. The vow of obedience , as Esther de Waal describes it below, simply asks us to listen . . .

God Is There All the Time Wednesday of the Fourth Week of Lent – March 25, 2020 Sometimes events in the outer world press us to grow in ways that we had not anticipated. The current coronavirus pandemic is one example, it seems to me. Our outer circumstances are forcing us to make adjustments we likely would not have made in “normal life.” Sometimes, our ongoing transformation depends on circumstances that more or less push us into some kind of life-change. Continual conversion does not just happen to us. We hold onto things to which we have grown accustomed. We hesitate to let go of that which is comfortable. Surrender and detachment can be painful, even costly. We are pressed into shifting our life-stance. We have to be reminded moment by moment that our ongoing conversion is moving toward some larger end. God is making us the people we were created to be. We are being shaped according to the purpose for which we were originally created. So God comes to us in this work. God