A Daily Lent

Is There Another Way? Friday of the Second Week of Lent – March 13, 2020 Over the years, we grow so accustomed to the broad gate and the wide road that we cannot imagine any other way to live. Wide roads are comfortable and give us lots of wiggle room. We learn to maneuver on wide roads. Elizabeth O’Connor, in the paragraphs below (which continue her thoughts from yesterday’s Lenten post), says that usually what jolts us from the wide road to the narrow road is “ an event, or a flash of insight, or a demanding ache. ” And then, after we have been jolted awake, God “ puts in the heart and the mouth the question, ‘Is there another way?’ ” Richard Rohr often makes a similar claim. He regularly says that our two most compelling teachers on this spiritual path are Great Love and Great Suffering. Those experiences have the capacity to shake us awake, so that we begin to ask about and seek out another way. That “other way” is what Jesus calls the “narrow road” and “narrow gate.” Thi...

Wide Roads and Narrow Roads Thursday of the Second Week of Lent In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus teaches his followers using this analogy: “Enter through the narrow gate. For wide is the gate and broad is the road that leads to destruction, and many enter through it. But small is the gate and narrow the road that leads to life, and only a few find it” (Matt. 7:13-14, NIV). You may want to shift your thinking a bit today. Traditionally, this passage has been used as a description of a person’s relationship to sin. The wide road is the road of a sin-filled life, I’ve heard often. But today, consider instead that Jesus is talking about our inner landscape. The wide road is not the life of wanton sin, but a life that basically flows along with the way things are, influenced by cultural mores, social patterns, and values that are generally accepted by a community or nation. The wide-road person is not reflective, that is, he or she does not question the validity of those values,...