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...

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 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...

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 ...

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...

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...

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 . . ....

Happiness Rises Saturday of the Third Week of Lent – March 21, 2020 I don’t want to undersell the difficulty and challenge in de Mello’s words this week. The work he describes with attachments is some of the most rigorous interior work we can undertake. At the same time, we experience a growing sense of interior freedom when we engage this spiritual work. There is a lightness of being that comes from not being weighed down by those people and things we cling to. And we have the experience, Fr Anthony describes, of “happiness rising.” Happiness arises between persons who are meeting without the desire to control, manipulate, or impress one another . . . happiness arises when we hear a beautiful piece of music . . . happiness arises when we participate in an act of kindness that makes a difference in the world . . . happiness arises when we see an object of beauty and stand still just to take the moment into ourselves. I love de Mello’s phrase. Happiness rising does not sugges...

Seeing What Is Real Wednesday of the Third Week of Lent – March 18, 2020 A spiritual practice is a contemplative practice if it helps you see the truth about God, self, others, and the world. Life is as simple – and as painfully difficult – as that. Most persons never question their perception of the truth. They experience life through their own filters (attachments, beliefs, fears) and never take time or energy to consider the filters. And for many persons, over the course of a lifetime, their filters never change. They die in old age clutching the same filters through which they saw God, self, others, and the world when they were 10 years old. The role of spiritual practice is to help us cut through the illusions of life. A good spiritual practice will help you see what is real more clearly. When you see, you may not like what you see, but then, liking what you see is not the point. Do you want to see the truth? Or are you content to continue seeing an illusion? [Before any...

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...

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,...

Living Close to Your Center Tuesday of the Second Week of Lent - March 10, 2020 When the inner life of the spirit is loosened within a person, there most always follows a burst of creativity. This creativity coincides with the emergence of our soul, which has its own vocabulary made up of images and symbols. Your soul, after all, doesn’t show up in words and eloquence . . . but in pictures, images, symbols. (This is why most of us are more in touch with our soul when we are in a place of natural beauty . . . a forest, in the mountains, on a seashore, and so on. In these places, words fall flat . . . our soul naturally connects to the more nuanced created world surrounding us.) The spiritual life makes you more expansive, more open to vastness and that which is Beyond. It does not cause you to be narrower, more protective, or more frightened of the unknown. This openness and expansiveness is the life of your soul. In today’s reading, Elizabeth O’Connor says that authentic crea...

Holding All of Life Together Saturday of the First Week of Lent – March 7, 2020 The life animated and guided by the Spirit – what we would call a spiritual life – is not separate from our normal, everyday life. We do not step in and out of these two ways of doing life. I hear some people, for example, talking about their “time for doing” and their “time for being,” as if life is divided into compartments that can be kept separate from one another. The spiritual life – or life animated by God’s Spirit – is not a life which removes us from the world or which touches only one aspect of our existence. The spiritual life, both being and doing, touches every all of life. It umbrellas everything. Henri Nouwen holds together these two poles . . . what he calls the “worry-filled life” and the “life of the Spirit.” The goal is not to move back and forth between these two ways of doing life, but rather, to increasingly bring them all under one umbrella, so that the life of God’s Spirit...

Inner Experience of Oneness Friday of the First Week of Lent – March 6, 2020 To engage the interior work of the spiritual life means that we begin a journey which will be long, slow, and messy. I don’t know any way around that reality. I first made conscious contact with God in the context of a faith tradition which promised – both implicitly and sometimes explicitly – that conversion was a one-time decision that would set you up for a lifetime. The goal was the moment of conversion, and any growth or becoming after that initial experience was a bonus. I quickly realized within my own self that simply responding to an altar call and mouthing some words about giving my life to Jesus did not change all that was sideways in my life. But at that time, I had no idea what to do about it. My best guess was that every time I “sinned,” I lost Jesus and had to go back through the process all over again – I must not have “really meant it” when I gave my life to Jesus all those previous ti...

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...

Hold Together Doing and Being Monday of the First Week in Lent – March 2, 2020 In the spiritual life, we are not asked to make a choice between doing and being, Martha and Mary (Luke 10:38-42), the contemplative life and the active life. In truth, everything we do is infused with who we are. Our being always shapes our doing. In the language of the Luke 10:38-42 story, we are invited to do our Martha-work in a Mary-way. In other words, to be about our lives with a sense of being centered and anchored in the deeper reality of God. Henri Nouwen wrote about the tension of activity and contemplation in this way: There is little doubt that Jesus’ life was a very busy life. He was busy teaching his disciples, preaching to the crowds, healing the sick, exorcising demons, responding to questions from foes and friends, and moving from one place to another. Jesus was so involved in activities that it became difficult to have any time alone. The following story gives us the picture: “Th...

Change of Heart First Sunday of Lent – March 1, 2020 Contemporary life treats busyness and worry as if they were badges of honor. We are quick to tell others what busy people we are, as if our busyness itself makes us important. The fact that I’m busy somehow contributes to the feeling that I’m indispensable and seems to increase my worthiness in the eyes of others. Culturally we’ve created a cult of busyness and productivity. There are fewer more disdained words in our society than the word “lazy.” The spiritual life does, in fact, speak to simplicity, silence and solitude. Intentional time during which we give our attention to God is vital to our spiritual well-being; however, we do not claim that the only way to live a spiritual life is to let go of all responsibilities and obligations. The notion that anyone could live the spiritual life if all life-duties were removed is simply false. Rather, the spiritual life is about developing a different consciousness in the midst o...