by Christine Sine
Relinquish, let go, give up. These are the words that reverberate in my mind as a begin Lent this year. For love of God, for love of the world, but also for love of self, and my own wellbeing, what am I willing to give up? In this season of life, and in this stage of my faith journey what do I need to give up to continue growing towards the wholeness God desires for me. These, for me, are the serious questions of Lent, but will I take them seriously or will I instead focus on giving up something trivial and unimportant.
Lent is about relinquishment. It confronts us with our mortality, our vulnerability, our ambitions. It confronts us with how seriously we will follow Jesus into the future. I think of this as I reread the story in Luke 4:1-13 of Jesus sent out into the desert to be tempted by the devil. He is tempted by the desire for food and physical satisfaction, by the desire for power and wealth, and by the temptation to worship other gods, than the one he knows to be the creator of the universe and the only one worth bowing down to.
Our own temptations often take on a similar guise. Maybe we don’t spend 40 days in the desert, and maybe the devil doesn’t appear to us as dramatically, but throughout our lives we are tempted to satisfy physical needs not just for food but for clothing, housing and other material goods, often in extravagant ways. We are also tempted to accumulate wealth and power for ourselves and not for sharing with those in need around us. We are tempted too, to worship in ways that don’t put our creator God at the centre. Bound up in this is a temptation to create our own kingdoms of influence and have others worship us.
I think sometimes we only become aware of how much we have succumbed to temptation when we need to give something up. I ponder this as I launch my podcast, the Liturgical Rebels. At the same time I sense God is asking me to give up other aspects of the ministry I have been involved in for the last 20+ years. It’s hard to do that. Hard to let go, hard to rethink how we spend our time when we still enjoy what we do. I wonder if Jesus found it hard to let go of being a carpenter and the security of a steady income, and a stable life without the threats of violence and death.
At this point in time I still feel I am out in the wilderness considering what this new stage of life could look like. I love interviewing people and listening to their stories. I love encouraging people to consider fresh and nourishing ways to draw close to God but it takes time and something must go. I covet your prayers as I use this season of Lent to reshape my thinking for the future.
Let go
Says the whisper
In my mind.
Let go
Of what has had
It’s season of life
And productivity
And is now ready to rest.
Let go.
Let the nourishment
Of the old,
Provide life for the new.
Let go,
Stay close to your inner world,
Travel slowly through the hidden corridors
Of your heart.
Listen quietly not for answers,
But for the questions
Hiding beneath the stress,
Of your uncertainty.
Do not be afraid,
Of what you will uncover,
Of what you might relinquish,
If you become honest
With yourself.
Let go,
Listen.
It is a sacred art,
uncovering holy moments,
Divine encounters
That draw us
Into intimacy with God.
(c) Christine Sine.
On Friday we launched the Liturgical Rebels podcast with an inaugural episode in which Christine Sine and Forrest Inslee talk about what it means to be a liturgical rebel and why you should consider becoming one.
This podcast is for those who feel restricted to spiritual practices that often seem outdated and of little relevance in today’s world. It is for those who are discouraged to express their own creative talents and develop spiritual practices that are uniquely them, The Liturgical Rebels podcast is for people who want to reimagine and reconstruct their faith and spiritual practices.
The Liturgical Rebels Podcast empowers followers of Jesus to creatively reconstruct their faith and spiritual practices. Through conversation with groundbreaking practitioners from around the world who think creatively about new approaches to spirituality, we will emphasize the sacredness of all things and uncover ways in which God speaks to us through nature and creativity, through restorative justice and environmental concern, and through the mundane and ordinary acts of daily life. This podcast is for those who don’t want to just deconstruct, but also to reconstruct faith and spiritual practices; those who want to reshape belief and practice to journey closer to God and the wholeness, peace, justice and flourishing God intends not just for us as individuals but for the earth and all its inhabitants.
Episode 1 link
In this inaugural episode Christine Sine and Forrest Inslee discuss what it means to be a liturgical rebel and why it matters. They discuss how we enhance our faith by connecting to God revealed in nature, in creativity, and in the everyday acts of life. They encourage us to explore our own pathways to discover spiritual expressions that resonate in our souls, strengthen our faith and nourish our spirits. You can find out more about Forrest Inslee at Earthkeepers Podcast and Circlewood.
How are you feeling as this Lenten season begins? I’m baby stepping into Lent…going slowly into the season of reflection and continuing to ponder Jesus in the Wilderness and the Invitations of Lent.
be here now
Lent invites us to be PRESENT with Jesus.
Lent invites us into the WILDERNESS. Into places of desolation and discernment.
Lent invites us to be present with Jesus in the Wilderness.
To be present with others who are in the Wilderness
To be present to our own suffering and the suffering of others, being present to those who are alone and feeling abandoned, those who are forsaken, lost, hopeless, angry or depressed.
TAKE SOME TIME TO PRAY for people who are suffering and places where suffering is happening in our world.
How are you being invited to be PRESENT with Jesus during this Lenten Season? What do you need to be more present?
MARK 1:9-15 FIRST NATIONS VERSION
It was in those days that Creator Sets Free (Jesus) came from his home in Seed Planter Village (Nazareth) in the territory of Circle of Nations (Galilee), to have Gift of Goodwill (John) perform for him the purification ceremony.
Creator Sets Free (Jesus) was a mature man of about thirty winters. The time had come for him to show himself to all the people and begin his great work. He waded out into the river to have Gift of Goodwill (John) perform the ceremony.
10As soon as Creator Sets Free (Jesus) came up from the water, he saw the sky open. The Spirit of Creator came down like a dove and rested on him. 11Then a voice from the sky spoke like distant thunder, “This is my much-loved Son who makes my heart glad!”
HIS VISION QUEST
12Right then and there the Spirit drove Creator Sets Free (Jesus) into the desert wilderness. 13For forty days and nights he remained there, surrounded by wild animals and being tested by Accuser (Satan)—the ancient trickster snake. Spirit-messengers also came to give him strength and comfort.
14Then later, after Gift of Goodwill (John) was arrested, Creator Sets Free (Jesus) traveled to the territory of Circle of Nations (Galilee) to tell the good story.
15“The time has now come!” he said to the people. “Creator’s good road is right in front of you. It is time to return to the right ways of thinking and doing! Put your trust in this good story I am bringing to you.”
What do you notice that you haven’t notices before?
What is the Holy Spirit Highligting for you form this passage?
USE THE ART TO HELP YOU CONTEMPLATE the Invitation of Lent and the Wilderness:
The Main Painting is “Man of Sorrows” by William Dyce
A Scottish Artist who painted Jesus in the Wilderness as a Scottish in the Scottish Highlands. What would your wilderness look like? and What does your Jesus look like?
Christ in the Wilderness by Kelly Latimore
Imagine sitting in the Wilderness with Jesus. Sitting around a fire. What would you want to talk about? Know about? Learn? How does it feel to know that Jesus is with you in the Wilderness? That you are not alone?
Christ in the Wilderness Ivan Kramskoy
The Wilderness is a place of temptation. How are are you and I being tempted? What things cause us to follow ways of the Enemy rather that the Way of Jesus? For me, it’s my phone (too much social media), my work, my ambition, my judgement of others, my inaction and my negative reactions all get in the way of LOVE. My fear often blocks my faith. The bitterness of the world gets under my skin and I become like it, sadly more hateful rather than more loving.
This Lent I need Jesus to heal me!
Learn more about this painting:
Christ in the Desert/ Wilderness 1872 painting by Russian artist Ivan Kramskoi,
Lent begin with the Ashes of Ash Wednesday…to remind us of our mortality and our need for Jesus and his love, healing, and resurrection power! READ THE POEM and consider just what the CREATOR of the Universe can do with DUST! Can do with you and your life, can do with you even in your wilderness this Lent!
BLESSING THE DUST
All those days
You felt like dust, like dirt,
As if all you had to do was turn your face
Toward the wind And be scattered to the four corners.
Or swept away
By the smallest breath
As insubstantial—
Did you not know what the Holy One
Can do with dust?
This day we freely say, we are scorched.
This hour, We are marked by what has made it
Through the burning.
This is the moment ask for the blessing that lives within
The ancient ashes,
That makes its home inside the soil of this sacred earth.
So let s be marked not for sorrow.
And let us be marked, not for shame.
Let us be marked not for false humility
or for thinking we are less that we are.
But for claiming
What God can do
Within Dust,
Within Dirt,
Wishing the stuff
of which the world’s made
And the stars that blaze in our bones
and the galaxies that spiral
inside the smudge we bear.
JAN RICHARDSON from “Circle of Grace: A book of Blessings for the Seasons”
Listen to these SONGS and CREATE your own Lenten Playlist to help you be present with Jesus this Lent
“As Lent is the time for greater love, listen to Jesus’ thirst … He knows your weakness. He wants only your love, wants only the chance to love you.”
– St. Teresa of Calcutta
Let Jesus LOVE YOU this Lent!
Virtual Retreat with Christine Sine on March 2nd 10 am – 12 pm (PST)
What do you long for as you look towards Easter?
How can we create Beauty from the ashes of the past?
How do we enter into God’s Lenten story that prepares us for the death and resurrection of Easter?
The Lenten season is meant to be a time for reflection, retreat and refocusing in preparation for our celebration of Easter. Yet most of us find it hard to take time out of our busy schedules for this much needed reorientation time.
Christine Sine will host a morning of scripture reading and quiet reflection that will be for many of us a much needed oasis of quiet in the midst of our chaotic lives.
Join us March 2nd 10 am-12 pm PST (check my timezone) or watch the recording later.
You can still sign up for all three virtual winter/spring retreats at a considerable discount. You will receive the recording of the first retreat and access to the next two retreats with Christine on March 2nd and May 11th.
Lent serves as an opportunity for believers to draw closer to God, examining their lives and seeking a deeper connection with their faith. Amidst the various practices embraced during this time, the use of scripture memorization cards emerges as a valuable tool for spiritual enrichment. Scripture cards like these ones (https://creatoriq.cc/3SKBggN)
As we embark on this Lenten journey, let us embrace the significance of this season and consider incorporating scripture memorization cards into our daily practices. By committing these verses to heart, we open ourselves to a richer and more profound experience of Lent, ultimately drawing nearer to the spiritual renewal that Easter promises.
Resources to enrich your lenten celebration. Includes downloads of: A Journey Into Wholeness, Lent/Easter Prayer Cards, and 40 Daily Ideas Guide for Lent.
Welcome to the season of Lent. Tomorrow is Ash Wednesday, the day on which we traditionally paint ash crosses on our foreheads as a sign of our mortality. “Remember you are dust, and to dust you shall return.” This is a wonderful practice that I hope you will embrace. If you are unable to attend a church service, consider creating your own ashes. It may make priests cringe, as they are not consecrated, but, maybe it’s the liturgical rebel in me that says, I can adapt this to be more meaningful for me and it is a very meaningful practice that I highly recommend. I like to use some of the palm Sunday crosses or palms I was given the previous year and often add post it notes on which I write what I plan to give up during Lent.
This year (see video) I burnt my palms in the new Lenten garden I talk about in my Meditation Monday: Creating a New Lenten Garden. I created it to help me focus during Lent and keeping the burnt palms in it for the first few days enhances that focus. As I burnt the palms, I asked myself the 2 questions I suggest in my Meditation Monday “For love of God what is one thing I will give up during Lent?” and “For love of the world what is one thing I will give up for this season? These are 2 questions I will return to regularly over the next few weeks. For love of the world, God gave up so much, what am I willing to give up in return?
I am also preparing for my Lenten Quiet Day Retreat: Beauty from Ashes coming up on March 2nd. Scheduling time to pause in our busy lives to pray, to reflect and refocus is an important part of Lent and I hope you will join us for this retreat time. The purpose of Lent is to prepare us for the wonder of Easter and the resurrection of Christ. In this retreat we will share scriptures, read poems and reflect on the story of death and resurrection that is the centre for Lent and Easter celebrations. Have you signed up? Don’t forget. It is only a couple of weeks away.
A great place to begin your Lenten reflections is with Bill Borror’s post Come and See in which he stated: “Lent invites us to deny our appetites” a little in order to expand our hearts and lives for God. It is a temporary saying no to the good things of this life, to taste the better eternal things of Christ. It’s a rebooting if you would of our ordinary routines, in order to glimpse the extraordinary mysteries of God all around us, that we tend to miss in the course of our busy, noisy day to day existence.
In her Freerange Friday The Invitation of Lent, Lilly Lewin reminded us that this is a wilderness experience, and comments: “One thing about being in the wilderness…it invites us to pay attention. To notice. You don’t survive very long in extreme wilderness situations or even on a simple hike in the forest if you aren’t paying attention…Paying attention to the path, to the weather, to dangers that might be ahead.”
On Thursday in Big Change (Transfiguration) Sunday Rodney Marsh reminded us that the Sunday before Lent is Transfiguration Sunday, celebrating when Jesus met Elijah and Moses on the mountain. I needed this reminder. As Rodney said, Jesus’ disciples shared this experience because they were willing to follow Jesus into a lonely place, expecting to pray. It is on the mountain top, in the place of prayer, alone with Jesus that we usually receive our direction for the future.
In her post Bent on Loving Us, Jenny Gehman talks about the upright position we assume when we fly and compares it to how Jesus came into the world. “To prepare for his arrival, he had to assume not an upright position but a bent one. And bend he did, into the tiniest of seeds in a woman’s dark womb.” Great insights from a new and unusual way of thinking of the gospel story.
As you get ready for Lent this year consider what helps you focus and keep focused during these weeks of preparation for Easter. This prayer “Fall In Love” by Father Pedro Arrupe is a great one to use at the beginning of Lent and also for Valentine’s Day.
Here is another prayer I wrote a couple of years ago you might like to use.
Jesus you came to save us.
We are marked with ashes,
We are but dust,
Only you can change our unclean souls.
Bring us to repentance,
Wash away the scars,
Plant seeds in the desert,
Bring life where death once reigned.
Cleanse us with the water of life.
Transform us God of all.
Restore our sight,
Renew our planet,
Teach us your wondrous truths.
Speak words that bring wholeness,
To us,
To our communities,
To the earth our island home.
Many blessings
Join Christine Sine on March 2nd 10a-12p PST (check my timezone) or watch the recording later.
What do you long for as you look towards Easter?
How can we create Beauty from the ashes of the past?
The Lenten season is meant to be a time for reflection, retreat and refocusing in preparation for our celebration of Easter. Yet most of us find it hard to take time out of our busy schedules for this much needed reorientation time.
Join Christine Sine for a morning of scripture reading and quiet reflection that will be for many of us a much needed oasis of quiet in the midst of our chaotic lives
by Christine Sine
I have gone from not thinking about Lent at all to having it become the main focus of my time. Over the weekend I created my Lenten garden. It was a fun contemplative process to work out the theme, find plants, rocks and other decorations and then put the garden together. It has been a wonderful way to prepare myself for Ash Wednesday and the whole season of Lent. I know it will provide a wonderful tool for centering myself each morning as I begin my day with God. It gave me an opportunity to think about Lent and what I hope to learn from it this year.
My theme for the year is “For Love of the world God did foolish things” so my first step was decorating a stone and writing the words around the decoration as a centre piece for the garden. Painting the rock gave me plenty of time to think about what the love of God means to me and how I have seen it expressed in my life and around the world during my lifetime. It was this that inspired the poem I wrote last week:
For love of the world,
This beautiful yet pain filled earth
On which we live,
God does foolish things.
How strange and unwise,
To send a much beloved son
To dwell amongst us,
Knowing he would die
A tragic and painful death.
Only love would be so reckless,
And so vulnerable.
Only God would care so much
For those who
despised and rejected Holy love.
For love of the world,
God does foolish things,
That turn the world upside down.
And bring life where we expected death.
(c) Christine Sin 2024
Unlike for Advent, when I bought several new objects to decorate my sacred space with, for Lent I wanted to only use repurposed objects. Lent is a season for cutting back and fasting, not one for spending. I chose plants from my huge collection of succulents, that I felt best represented the wilderness into which Jesus retreated. The desert is not dead. The plants that grow are able to survive with very little water however and they remind me that Lent is a time for learning to do without even the life giving water that we usually drink in abundance. I added sand to make it feel a little like a desert, and then more small stones, sprinkling my collection of heart shaped rocks around the entire garden.
Behind the garden I placed a plaque that Lilly Lewin gave me several years ago to emphasize my theme. As Lent progresses it is possible that I will add other Lenten symbols like crosses to the garden but I feel that this will work well for the beginning of Lent.
One of my practices for Ash Wednesday is to burn the crosses and palms from last year’s Palm Sunday parade. I will probably sprinkle some of the ash over the garden too. Will continue to share reflections as the garden inspires me.
This is the first contemplative garden I have created for almost a year and it is good to come back to this practice again. I love the whole process of its creation which begins with dreaming, then moves through the gathering of materials to creating before I get to the stage at which it is ready to be used for meditation. Finally, after Easter I will enter the last stage of the garden’s life – letting go, a hard but necessary step. As I comment in my book Digging Deeper: The Art of Contemplative Gardening, “Accepting and incorporating impermanence into our rituals enables us to accept and embrace change in a healthy and liberating way. We let go of our desire for permanence, of control, of acquisitiveness and even of our creative process. It is hard but we learn a lot in the process about ourselves, about God and God’s good creation.” it seems even more relevant as Lent slides into Easter.
As we look ahead towards Lent there are two questions I find myself grappling with that I would also like to challenge you to consider:
For love of God what is one thing you would like to give up during Lent?
For love of the world what is one thing you would like to give up for this season?
When I asked participants this at a retreat several years ago, people commented that it is easier to think of what they want to give up for God than to think of what they are willing to give up for the good of the world. Yet there is so much that we need to think about giving up. Perhaps there are privileges of wealth and education we need to give up. Or prejudice against those of other faiths, sexual orientations, or ethnic groups. Or you might consider giving up your car or the heat in your house for several day. Whatever you choose it might make you look foolish in the eyes of your friends or the world but if it makes God’s world a better place it is worth it.
I pray that you too will take time to develop a good focus for Lent and work towards a process that helps prepare you for the wonderful celebration of Easter. As part of your Lenten observances consider joining us for our upcoming Lenten Quiet Day retreat: Beauty Into Ashes.
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Join Christine Sine on March 2nd 10a-12p PST (check my timezone) or watch the recording later.
What do you long for as you look towards Easter?
How can we create Beauty from the ashes of the past?
The Lenten season is meant to be a time for reflection, retreat and refocusing in preparation for our celebration of Easter. Yet most of us find it hard to take time out of our busy schedules for this much needed reorientation time.
Join Christine Sine for a morning of scripture reading and quiet reflection that will be for many of us a much needed oasis of quiet in the midst of our chaotic lives.
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