Last week I asked the question What are you afraid of? I shared a couple of stories from friends about their fears and how they overcome them. What I did not share was my own story out of fear, partly because it is a very personal story, yet as I begin my journey through Lent it is here that God is leading me and it is out of this that I painted the rock in the prayer above. The “cross” in it is an outline of a darker pigment in the rock, that I first noticed when I picked up the rock a couple of years ago. As I examined it again this year, the cross beckoned to me. First it reminds me that if I keep silent the very rocks will cry out of the love of God. Second it reminds me that the love of God, expressed in Jesus’ sacrifice on the cross is hidden in many aspects of life and many parts of creation, just waiting to be noticed and brought to light.
What am I Afraid of?
As I prayerfully thought about this question what came to mind is my fear of being alone when I grow old. In some ways it is a legitimate fear. My husband Tom is 15 years older than I am, I have no children and my family is half a world away in Australia.
I think my fear originates from my experiences as a premature baby. I spent the first month of my life in hospital. My mother did not even see me until she brought me home. Not surprisingly I have always suffered from fears of being abandoned, left alone, disowned by my family.
None of these things have ever happened, but as we all know, fear is irrational.
As I pondered my fear I knew that even when I felt alone and isolated in that hospital incubator, God was with me. God nurtured and strengthened me so that I grew healthy and strong. My mother loved me and expressed her breast milk each day for me to drink. Prem, unexpected, difficult but still loved.
What Would I Do If I Was Not Afraid?
This was a very important question for me to ask myself at the beginning of my Lenten journey.
If I was not afraid I would see that I am never alone because God is always with me. I would nurture a deeper and more intimate relationship with God for the days ahead.
I would learn to appreciate more the community God has allowed me to be a part of – both those that live in our small residential community and those that don’t but that still provide friendship, love and caring.
I would nurture the relationships with my family, geographically distant though they may be as I know that these too will be important in the future.
How Could God’s Love Overcome this Fear?
No fear is legitimate I realize, not when we believe in a God who is everywhere and in everything, and certainly when I am surround by as much love and caring as I am.
As I began my Bible search on the word love this passage from Proverbs 3:3-5 (The Message) stood out for me:
Don’t lose your grip on (God’s) Love and Loyalty.
Tie them around your neck; carve their initials on your heart.
Earn a reputation for living well
in God’s eyes and the eyes of the people.
Trust God from the bottom of your heart;
don’t try to figure out everything on your own.
Listen for God’s voice in everything you do, everywhere you go;
he’s the one who will keep you on track.
So I come today repenting of my lack of recognition of the love around me and the ways I have, at times, lost my grip on God’s love and loyalty. Sometimes I have pushed this love away and rejected the One who always holds me tenderly as in a mother’s arms.
I have failed to appreciate the love of my heavenly father who has protected me from all the risky adventures of my life – like climbing mountains, working in refugee camps and travelling alone around the globe.
I have failed to fully enter into the generosity of God’s love, which has provided for me through all the tough and all the abundant economic times of my life.
I have failed to trust that my times are indeed in God’s hands and rested in the belief that all the love that has surrounded me since my conception will continue to surround me until my death.
I have failed to embrace the capacity of the love of my God who calls me a beloved daughter
For I have every confidence that nothing—not death, life, heavenly messengers, dark spirits, the present, the future, spiritual powers, height, depth, nor any created thing—can come between us and the love of God revealed in the Anointed, Jesus our Lord. (Romans 8:38,39, The Voice)
What is Your Response.
How long is it since you fully immersed yourself in the love of God. Watch the video below and think about the many ways in which God loves you. Is there a response that God is asking of you?
Giving God,
what do I give up,
this Lent?
For you
who remind me that
everything you have
given us is lent.
Fashioned
only for what,
it was meant.
A reason, a season or a day.
Everything is yours to give,
and take a way.
Giving God,
what do I release to you
this Lent?
My questions,
my answers, and
the prayers uttered
until I am spent.
Wondering
why do you not
give us what we want?
Instead you will
that we should give
to you our all.
That empty,
we might count our benefits.
“A Lent missed is a year lost from the spiritual life.”
Father Charles Owen Moore
Traditionally Lent is a time of fasting, self-denial, and simplicity, a time set apart for prayer and self-examination, repentance and renewal. It is a call to focus our lives on God’s purposes, to respond fully to God’s initiative, a season whose purpose is to draw us closer to God. Sister Wendy Beckett in her book Sister Wendy’s Meditations on the Mysteries of Our Faith writes:
Lent asks us to scrutinize, calmly and in the presence of God what direction our actions have led us and will lead us. Are we directed toward God? Or toward ourselves? Do we forgive? Do we pray? Do we try to be patient?
Jesus encourages us to focus our lives on God by steeping our “life in God-reality, God-initiative, God-provisions” (Matt. 6:33 Msg).
One way we steep in God-reality is to set aside time and space for prayer, reflection and to listen to God. Connection to God grounds us in the truth of who God is and who we are. We desperately need this grounding in a culture that is obsessed with self. Often when we look at ourselves it’s as if we’re gazing into a distorted mirror; either we exaggerate our faults and limitations and minimize our good qualities or we are over-confident in our abilities and blind to our limitations.
Steeping in God-reality we discover God knows our weakness and shortcomings but also knows our possibilities and potential. This allows us to look at our sin and brokenness remembering the truth of who, and whose, we are. Seeing ourselves in the light of God’s love enables us to move forward holding both our brokenness and our belovedness and to respond to God’s initiative in the present moment more freely and openly.
The image of steeping invites us to give God time and space to deepen our faith and produce fruit that is worthwhile. Many of us live as if a quick dip of a tea bag in lukewarm water is going to produce something worth drinking. Steeping can’t be rushed. Waiting for God’s initiative invites us to let go of working so hard.
Steeping our lives in what God is doing we no longer feel so much pressure to figure everything out and to be superstar Christians. “For we are what he has made us, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand to be our way of life” (Eph. 2:10). Knowing that God goes before us Jesus invites us to give our “entire attention to what God is doing right now ”(Matt. 6:34 Msg).
Giving our attention to what God is doing in the present moment we align ourselves with his purposes rather than asking him to join us in what we want to do. Living this way we discover God is already at work and “acts on behalf of those who wait for him” (Isaiah 64.4 Msg). Thus we learn by experience to have confidence in God and can go into our broken, crazy mixed up world and give away what we’ve received firsthand from God—grace, mercy, kindness and love.
Steeping our lives in God’s provision keeps us aware and grateful. It helps us remember who and whose we are. In John 1:3 we read that “everything was created through him; nothing—not one thing! — came into being without him. In Colossians 1:17, Paul reminds us:
We look at this Son and see God’s original purpose in everything created. For everything, absolutely everything, above and below, visible and invisible, rank after rank after rank of angels—everything got started in him and finds its purpose in him. He was there before any of it came into existence and holds it all together right up to this moment.
God has given us life and has even given his only son, Jesus, who gave his life to bring us back into right relationship with God the Father. Steeping our lives in God’s provision allows us to consider and “see how all that is good and every gift descends from on high…as rays descend from the sun, waters from a fountain”.
James 1:17 from the Message puts it this way, “Every desirable and beneficial gift comes out of heaven. The gifts are rivers of light cascading down from the Father of Light.” All the good and beauty we see, know, and experience comes from God’s hand. All holiness on earth is the fragrance of God present in and with us.
One way to steep in God’s provision is to spend time outside seeing the sunlight illuminating creation, feeling its warmth on your body and imagining how God is creating and bathing you in his love. Steeping our lives in God-reality, God-initiative and God-provision encourages us to desire to love God with our whole mind, heart and soul, to become the friend God wants us to be.
May your Lenten journey be a season of renewal and growth as you steep your life in who God is, what he is doing, and the gifts and graces of the present moment.
by Lynne Baab
Why do I find Ash Wednesday so moving? Is it my childhood memories of a smear of ashes on my forehead after going to church on Ash Wednesday? Is it the words that accompanied those ashes? “Remember that you are dust and to dust you shall return.” Maybe I remember the feel of the minister’s thumb on my forehead, making the sign of the cross as he spread the ashes, marking me with my identity as a Christian.
Numerous times as an adult, someone has used oil on my forehead in the sign of the cross, mostly when I have asked for prayer for healing, but as a child the only time I remember that feel of Jesus’ cross on my forehead was Ash Wednesday.
Maybe the whole notion of returning to dust took flight in my mind when I read A Ring of Endless Light by Madeleine L’Engle, my all time favorite L’Engle book. In it, she quotes a prayer from the Episcopal funeral service in the Book of Common Prayer that brings tears to my eyes every time I read it:
You only are immortal, the creator and maker of humankind; and we are mortal, formed of the earth, and to earth shall we return. For so did you ordain when you created me, saying, ‘You are dust, and to dust you shall return.’ All of us go down to the dust; yet even at the grave we make our song: Alleluia, alleluia, alleluia.
When I was an associate pastor serving in a congregation in Seattle, I performed several graveside services, and I always had the sense of standing in a doorway between this world and the next. Those doorway moments enable us to sing our alleluias even as we grieve at the utter devastation of death.
The English word “dust” that we use for Ash Wednesday services is a bit deceptive. The Ash Wednesday words evoke Genesis 2:7, which describes the creation of Adam like this: “The Lord God formed man from the dust of the ground” (NRSV). I looked at 20 translations of that verse, and all but two use “dust.” In English, “dust” sounds dry and lifeless.
The Hebrew word can also be translated clay, loam or earth, and the plural meals “clods of earth.” Obviously dust doesn’t form clods or clump together very well, so the Hebrew word must be referring to the kind of moist earth that clumps together. I’ve been enjoying changing the Ash Wednesday words to: Remember that you are formed of the earth, and to earth you will return.
Because of the life, suffering, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, the return of our bodies to the earth is not the last word. Jesus overcame death, breaking its power, so that when our bodies return to the earth, we can still sing “alleluia.” As we journey through Lent, we reflect on the awful power of sin and death that brought Jesus to earth. We reflect on what he suffered for us, so that we can say at funeral services and on Ash Wednesday,
All of us go down to the dust; yet even at the grave we make our song: Alleluia, alleluia, alleluia.”
by Christine Sine
I am ready for Ash Wednesday. I always like to start early as a symbol of solidarity with friends in Australia and New Zealand for whom the day has already dawned.
This morning, I burnt the crosses and palms from last year’s Palm Sunday procession as a reminder of Christ’s sacrifice on the Cross. This is the traditional way that ashes are made for the Ash Wednesday celebrations. They are usually mixed with holy water or oil and applied to the forehead in the shape of a cross as a symbol of repentance. People of all traditions now observe this ritual and services are held in churches of all traditions. You can even celebrate on the streets, outside train stations, coffee shops, cinemas or grocery stores, in some places with Ashes to Go, a rapidly growing movement that offers anyone who is interested an opportunity to participate in this ritual and receive a prayer of blessing.
Lent and Easter celebrates the ultimate gift of God’s love. In my Monday Meditation this week, I asked, What am I afraid of? Today, and as I ponder the season of Lent, I wonder how my fears have restricted God’s love from being expressed in my life: What do I need to give up in order for God’s love to be fully realized in my life?
You can check out our entire list of prayers and resources for Ash Wednesday, Lent and Easter here.
Christine Valters Paintner —
Every breath is a resurrection.
—Gregory Orr (excerpt from poem “Concerning the Book that is the Body of the Beloved”)
In the monastic tradition there is a practice called statio, which is the commitment to stop one thing before beginning another. Imagine, instead of rushing from one appointment to the next, that between each one you pause, you breathe just five long slow breaths. Imagine how this might transform your movement from one activity to another. Or even when you move from one room to another, allow a brief pause on the threshold between spaces. God lives inside our breath and so every breath can become a resurrection.
For the Celtic monks, thresholds were sacred places. The space or the moment between – whether physical places or experiences – is a place of possibility. Rather than waiting being a nuisance, or a sense that you are wasting time, it is an invitation to breathe into the now and receive its gifts.
Each moment of the breath is a threshold – the movement from inhale to fullness to exhale to emptiness. The breath can help us stay present to all of the moments of transition in our lives, when we feel tempted to rush breathlessly to the next thing. Instead, what happens in our bodies and hearts when we intentionally pause? When we honor this threshold as sacred? When we breathe deeply and slowly for even a single minute?
Statio calls us to a sense of reverence for slowness and mindfulness. We can open up a space within for God to work. We can become fully conscious of what we are about to do rather than mindlessly starting and completing another task. We call upon the breath as an ancient soul friend to help us to witness our lives unfolding, rather than being carried along until we aren’t sure where our lives are going. We can return again and again to our bodies and their endless wisdom and listen at every threshold.
We often think of these in between times as wasted moments and inconveniences, rather than opportunities to return again and again to the expansiveness of the present moment and the body’s opening to us right now. Our invitation is to awaken to the gifts right here, not the ones we imagine waiting for us beyond the next door.
(excerpted and adapted from The Wisdom of the Body)
Christine Valters Paintner, PhD, REACE is the online Abbess at AbbeyoftheArts.com, a virtual global monastery offering resources in contemplative practice and creative expression. She is the author of ten books including her newest, The Wisdom of the Body: A Contemplative Journey to Wholeness for Women. Christine lives on the wild edges of Ireland with her husband where they lead pilgrimages and retreats.
by Christine Sine
It is still a few days until the beginning of Lent, but I have started early. The hate, anger and animosity I see around me is overwhelming and I think at its heart is fear.
What are we afraid of? This is a question I have reflected on a lot this week as my first step in reflecting on my first theme Let Fear Become Love. I suspect I may not get beyond this first theme for several weeks.
My scripture for the week is 1 John 4:17-18 quoted here from The Message
God is love. When we take up permanent residence in a life of love, we live in God and God lives in us. This way, love has the run of the house, becomes at home and mature in us, so that we’re free of worry on Judgment Day—our standing in the world is identical with Christ’s. There is no room in love for fear. Well-formed love banishes fear. Since fear is crippling, a fearful life—fear of death, fear of judgment—is one not yet fully formed in love.
Why Are We Afraid?
We live in a world filled with fear especially fear of those who are different be it Muslims, people who are LBGTQ, the homeless, people of other ethnicities. Yet most of us are afraid to confront ur fears and do anything about them. Instead we barricade ourselves behind walls of hate and self righteousness.
On a recent trip to Portland my friend Heather shared that she had recently asked this question of her small group. As she pondered her own life she realized that one of her fears was of disabled people. She prayerfully considered what she could do about this and decided to spend time at the local L’Arche community which houses disabled people. When she arrived a woman with Down Syndrome was making a high pitched noise that Heather found alarming. As the evening progressed however, she realized that the woman was laughing. She seemed to be filled with joy and this was her way of expressing it. Her interactions with this woman and others in the community broke down her fear and transformed it into love.
Another member of the group confessed her fear of Muslims. Her response? She visited the local mosque. The Iman was not there but his wife was. The woman enjoyed a wonderful conversation with her over tea and cookies which are always available at the mosque for hospitality. She was able to make an appointment to bring a bigger group back for a visit. Here too her fear was transformed into love.
What is Your Response?
Read through the scripture above and listen to the song below, one of my favourites from John Bell. Prayerfully ask yourself What am I afraid of? Write down the first thing that comes to mind. Think about your fear and the impact it has on your life. Where do you think that fear comes from?
Share your fear and how it makes you feel with a friend.
Read through the scripture again and listen to the song. Now prayerfully, together, ask yourself What would I do if I was not afraid? Listen quietly for God’s response and consider one action you could take in response to your fear that could help you overcome it. Is there a way to reach out to the person or community you are afraid of that shows love rather than fear? You might want to respond as a group and recruit other friends who have similar fears.
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