A Daily Lent

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 ...

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...