A Daily Lent

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...

Continual Conversion of Life Tuesday of the Fourth Week of Lent – March 24, 2020 In my religious upbringing, conversion was a one-time event. I made a decision for Christ, made that decision public at an altar call, and then coasted on. That was the conversion package. It took me years to understand that conversion was an ongoing action of God’s Spirit within me. I did not arrive fully formed in that altar-call moment. That night was simply a moment in which I was conscious of making a significant shift in my life’s direction. The real work of conversion lay ahead of me . . . and still does. This work is ongoing. The journey does not end. The contemplative says that standing still is important, being present to every moment of life. But moving onward is also crucial. If we stand still, we calcify. The contemplative holds together the dichotomy that we must stand still in order to know God and know ourselves. At the same time, we must journey on in order to bring mercy and compa...

Both/And, not Either/Or Saturday of the Second Week of Lent – March 14, 2020 Healthy spirituality holds together both the inward journey and the outward journey. We are not given an either/or choice; rather, we engage the two movements in a both/and way My first movements into spiritual formation were so radically different from any way I had known previously that I imagined this new journey inward was going to remove me from the difficulties of the world . . . that the inner life would heighten my immunity to all that was problematic in the world. I thought the inward journey would insulate me from “the world, the flesh, and the devil” (as John Chrysostom, the early spiritual writer, said centuries ago). Only over time did I come to see that the journey inward is matched by a journey back out into the world. The two movements must be held together. We don’t have the privilege of choosing one or the other. And make no mistake . . . this way leads to life . . . it is a hard wa...

Can I Trust My Response? Sunday of the Second Week of Lent – March 8, 2020 Too often our life with God is segregated so that a life of worship, prayer, devotion, and love of God is taken as a different thing than a life of service, mission, action, and love of neighbor. Every Christian community I know struggles to balance these two movements. Some give themselves to prayer and devotion, feeling that it is the better part. Others give themselves to action, wanting to see the fruit of their faith. Then a large group – perhaps the majority – stand in the middle, confused over the whole matter, and thus paralyzed, not doing a thing. Of course, the answer is not “either/or” but rather “both/and.” An inward journey of prayer, meditation and openness leads to a love of God that transforms life. When we travel into the heart of God, we begin to see differently and think differently. Inner transformation happens in that seeing and thinking. Transformation is not for our personal enjo...

You Make the Path by Walking Thursday of the First Week of Lent – March 5, 2020 There is no single way to live the spiritual life. We have centuries of clues, passed down to us through the centuries by those who have sought a deeper connection with God and who lived meaningful in the world. But in many ways, we follow their clues in order to find our own way more fully. While some versions of Christianity promise to lead us into more and more certainty (and call it, “faith”), the contemplative spiritual tradition tends to lead us deeper and deeper into mystery and the unknown. We enter into a “cloud of unknowing” . . . we experience the “dark night of the soul.” There is no single template for journeying in this cloud or dark night. I’m drawn to the image of journey to describe the nature of contemplative spirituality, and I often think that the journey is mostly uncharted. In one of his poems, Antonio Machado says that we make the path by walking. Why should we call these...

Fat Tuesday February 25, 2020 The season of Lent suggests starkness, struggle, and difficulty. Typical Lenten images include desert and dust, pilgrimage and preparation. Words like repentance and redemption show up often. Some folks image Lent as a time for a spiritual house-cleaning. Those images are appropriate and good, with a long history in the Church. They help us realize that we don’t appear on Easter morning to celebrate the Resurrection of Christ without some context, without making a journey toward that celebration. I affirm those understandings of Lent and their corresponding images, but I want to suggest another image for Lent. Lent is also the time to dig deeper into the heart of God, to find ourselves immersed more completely in the mercy, compassion, and generosity that are at the center of life. This may not be a typical Lenten theme, but I believe it carries significance for us. The journey with Jesus toward Holy Week, the cross and Resurrection is a pilgrimage o...