Here is a beautiful prayer from Bonnie Harr designed to be used in walking the labyrinth at this season.
Playing for the ashes… it conjures up for many of us (at least from the British Commonwealth) the test cricket match between Australia and England, probably one of the most fiercely fought international games. But that is not what I am writing about here. The ashes that I am thinking of have nothing to do with a game but with Ash Wednesday which ushers in probably the most serious event of history – Jesus final days and his walk towards the Cross.
For many of us, today (yes, it is already Ash Wednesday in Australia) marks the beginning of a personal journey too as we join Jesus in his final days. Unfortunately, many of us treat the season of Lent like a game – more like the cricket match called the Ashes than like the serious turn around time it is meant to be. We come to the season with a list of trivial things we intend to give up – TV, video games, chocolate, but most of us don’t really take the season seriously or use it as a time to dig deeply into our hearts to sweep out the corners in which sin has accumulated.
The ashes used in church services on Ash Wednesday are traditionally made by burning the Palm Sunday crosses from the previous year so this year I decided to experiment. My Palm Sunday cross from last year was still sitting in my office, so I burnt it, reminding myself that the repentance I seek at this season is only possible because of the incomprehensible gift of Christ and his death on a cross 2,000 years ago.
Burning my Palm Sunday cross had a big impact on me. It reminded me that the crucifixion is not really meant to be the focus of our mourning and fasting. We mourn and fast not because we are heading to the cross but because we want to shed all that disrupts our intimate walk with God. We look beyond the cross to the life of God’s kingdom. Asking myself what still needs to be repented of and transformed in my life so that I can be an effective citizen of God’s resurrection created world is probably the most important question of Lent. I want to become all that God intends me to be. I want to leave behind all that prevents me from becoming that person. I want to thirst for righteousness and hunger for justice rather than for water and food.
Shrove Tuesday is the day before Ash Wednesday, the beginning of Lent in the Western Church. “Shrove” is the past tense of the word “shrive,” which means to hear a confession, assign penance, and absolve from sin. Shrove Tuesday is a reminder that we are entering a season of penance.
Shrove Tuesday is also known as Fat Tuesday or Mardi Gras (which is simply French for Fat Tuesday). In Italy, Fat Tuesday is known as carnevale-goodbye to meat-from which we get our English word carnival. Traditionally people held one last rich feast, using up perishables like eggs, butter and milk before the fast of Lent began. Now in some places, like New Orleans, this has become a huge celebration that really has nothing to do with the beginning of Lent.
For many however this is still a significant day. Many churches hold pancake suppers, often as a way to reach out to their neigbours. You can find a great collection of recipes and traditions from around the world for Shrove Tuesday in Fat Tuesday Recipes.
For Eastern Orthodox Christians Clean Monday, the Monday before Ash Wednesday, is the first day of Great Lent. It is a reminder that we should begin Lent with good intentions and a desire to clean our spiritual house. It is a day of strict fasting for Eastern Catholics and orthodox, including abstinence not only from meat but from eggs and dairy products as well.
The following prayer of St. Ephrem the Syrian is a common prayer used during this season.
O Lord and Master of my life, keep from me the spirit of indifference and discouragement, lust of power and idle chatter. [kneel/prostration]
Instead, grant to me, Your servant, the spirit of wholeness of being, humble-mindedness, patience, and love. [kneel/prostration]
O Lord and King, grant me the grace to be aware of my sins and not to judge my brother; for You are blessed now and ever and forever. Amen. [kneel/prostration]
For a meditation based on clean Monday check out Meditation Monday – Clean Up Your Act
I posted a prayer similar to this on my Facebook page Light for the Journey a couple of days ago and someone commented “This would make a good Ash Wednesday prayer”. So I thought that I would adapt it for that use. Enjoy!
Lent begins in a few days and I am looking forward to celebrating this season with you. There is still time to join up to participate in the events and activities we are preparing. I hope that you will share these with your friends and send us feedback on what you do to celebrate this season of retreat, reflection and refocusing.
There is still time to sign up for Saturday’s retreat at the Mustard Seed House too.
The season of Lent awakens in all of us a hunger for deeper intimacy with God. Our world is alive with the presence of God, beckoning for our attention. Yet we are often distracted by busyness, worry and work.
Explore the simple things of everyday life – breathing, drinking a glass of water, running, picking up a stone or taking a photo – that open our senses to the God who shines through every moment and enlivens every creature. Develop new practices not just for this season but for future as well. Sign up here
If you cannot join us for the morning consider your own retreat, alone or together with friends. Carve out 2-3 hours at a minimum. Find a place with few distractions where you can sit quietly before God and reflect on your spiritual state. You might like to start with a breathing prayer to help you relax, or with a spiritual audit. If you keep a journal, you might like to read back over your entries for the last few months. What are the common themes? What has God been saying to you? How could you refocus your life to be more attentive to God during the season of Lent? Establish one new practice for the season of Lent. How will your keep yourself accountable to that practice?
Many of you have already downloaded the free study guide and purchased Return to Our Senses as a focus for the season. Others I know are preparing posts for the series that will begin on this blog on Thursday entitled Return to Our Senses in Lent. There is still time to contribute if you would like to share your own Lenten practices with us. The focus for this series is practices that transform your everyday activities and encounters into prayer and spiritual practices. Prayer is meant to interweave through all of life but we still need help to recognize how to integrate prayerful practices into our day. I hope that you will use this Lenten season to deepen your own relationship with God by establishing new spiritual disciplines.
Many of us are grieving the loss of good friend and co-worker for the kingdom Richard Twiss. I am sure that many of you have already heard he died this morning from a massive heart attack. Richard and his wife Katherine, open the eyes of many of us to the challenges faced by indigenous peoples im many countries, especially that of Native Americans here in the U.S. He will be greatly missed. The quote below was posted on Facebook this morning.
The Passing of Richard Leo Twiss, Taoyate Obnajin “He Stands with his People”
As of Saturday, February 9, 2013 Richard Leo Twiss, Lakota, co-founder and President of Wiconi International, passed into the eternal kingdom of the Creator as he took up the journey of life on the other side, to be with the Lord whom he loved and served so diligently on this side of life.
Richard walked the good road with Jesus from 1974, and continues his walk now on the other side of life.In the final hours of Richard’s journey on this side, he was surrounded by his wife Katherine, his four sons, Andrew, Phillip, Ian and Daniel, along with close friends who sang, prayed, laughed and reminisced together about his impact in life among them, and within the wider kingdom of his Creator.
A fuller description of the impact and ministry of our brother, Richard Twiss, will be posted at a later date.
“The noun torah comes from a verb, yarah, that means to throw something, a javelin, say, so that it hits its mark. The word that hits its mark is torah… As we prepare to pray, to answer the words God addresses to us, we learn that all of God’s words have this characteristic: they are torah and we are the target.”
—Eugene Peterson, Answering God
I sit on the sofa in a circle of lamplight. Night presses on the windowpanes. Cold seeps through them. But the heat rattles in the registers, and I am cozy under a fleece blanket.
The house is quiet. Everyone else is asleep. The stars have aligned tonight and given me a moment of silence, alone in asleeping house in the dark of a midwinter night.
My Bible lies open on my lap. I am praying through the Psalms again, morning and (when I can manage it) night. Tonight I read Psalm 11:
In the Lord I take refuge;
how can you say to my soul,
“Flee like a bird to your mountain,
for behold, the wicked bend the bow;
they have fitted their arrow to the string
to shoot in the dark at the upright in heart;
if the foundations are destroyed,
what can the righteous do?”
On the one hand, the poetry moves me—the image of the bird and the bow, the arrow on the loose, the destroyed foundations. On the other hand, the reality of the image hits a little closer to home than I would like.
These past six months I have been writing a memoir about my postpartum year with twins, a year marked by the darkest days I have ever known. Revisiting that dark time has been healing, of course, a chance to make sense of my experience, to see how God has redeemed it. But it also raises a lot of questions, questions for which I don’t have answers, questions like the Psalmist’s in this psalm: if the foundations are destroyed, what can the righteous do?
In the darkness of my postpartum experience, I felt like the foundations of my life, of my self were being eroded and destroyed. And what do you do when you are no longer the person you’ve always believed yourself to be, when your faith—and therefore your identity—is shaken and you’re clinging to it by your fingernails and you know there’s a wicked something-or-other out there with a bow and an arrow trained on your grasping fingers?
Wrapped in my blanket, I shiver a little. But I am not ready to go to bed. The silence is rich, alive somehow, the circle of lamplight comforting, though I know the darkness presses at the edge of my sight. I flip through the pages of my Bible and stop at John 10. I’m not sure why, really, but I think the Good Shepherd story might cheer me, might remind me whose I am, and send that bow-wielder back to the dark from whence he came.
I read the Good Shepherd story. It’s a wonderful story, really, but so familiar as to cease to amaze. A pity, that. But I keep reading, past the space break in my Bible with its bold heading to show that we’re moving on to a new topic. Only we aren’t. Jesus is still talking about sheep. He says,
“My sheep hear my voice, and I know them, and they follow me. I give them eternal life, and they will never perish, and no one will snatch them out of my hand.”
And suddenly, I am weeping. I read those words again and again, like a woman dying of thirst who has stumbled upon a spring. But this spring is inside of me, and I didn’t even know it was there. The tears keep coming, and I don’t even know why I’m crying. Something in those words released something in me, and it’s flowing down my cheeks.
Later, I will talk about this with my spiritual director, and she will help me see that these words touched a deep place of fear in me, the fear in which I lived during my postpartum darkness, the fear that I would cease to be, that I would never see my children again. These words of Jesus promise that life is forever, that I will never perish, that my children will never perish, that nothing and no one can snatch us from the hand of God. And I will say that I know that, that I have even written words to that effect before, many times. I will say I don’t know why this time they got through my intellectual filters and stabbed me right in my heart.
But for now, sitting on the sofa in a circle of quiet, I have yet to think those thoughts. I only know that Jesus’ words have stirred something deep in me, and though I don’t understand why, I also know that these are healing tears, tears of release and return and redemption. And I am grateful. Grateful for the words. Grateful for the tears. Grateful for God’s grace that would prompt me to read a familiar passage again and speak through it words I didn’t even know I needed to hear.
“Prayer,” Eugene Peterson says, “begins in the senses, in the body.” If that is so, then this night, I am praying as truly as I know how.
Post and photos by Kimberlee Conway Ireton, general misfit, mother of four, and author of The Circle of Seasons: Meeting God in the Church Year.
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