Lenten Post

When despair grows in me
And I wake in the middle of the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting for their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

Wendell Berry

I understand what Wendell Berry is pointing to, and inviting us to do. On three different pastoral visits this week I heard some people, older mostly, who spoke with such pessimism, fears, about the future of the world and the state of current affairs, economy, and politics and violence in the world.
But as I read Berry, in the winter days of Minnesota, the setting and the image has to be adapted, not to wood drakes, herons, and waters, but to perhaps, in this season,
the frost on the tamaracks, oak branches, pine boughs, and the cat tail rushes, and the reflection of the sun on those icy snow crystals.
Faith and spiritual work, can be a mind-full, (or mind less?) walk on a bright winter day. ..or just choosing to see what is here, uniquely, now. Gift. It too is a way to rest in the grace of the world. And I am free. A Stillness and a Peace
Go see it before it passes! But walk slowly!

Saturday Feb 23 Lenten Post. Cross work

I have never been attracted to the traditional Lenten practices of meditating on the passion of Christ, the sufferings of the cross and so on. I understand it as something that points us to the events of Holy Week and Easter. “We are going to the cross with Jesus.” Or I can understand the cross as a way of symbolizing our practices of self denial. Yes, I know it can be a traditional way of reflecting on how much he loved us; suffering for us, and went through for us. That was, I suppose, the thinking behind the popularity of Gibson's movie "The Passion of the Christ, " Still, I have wondered if there is another intuitive layer to this.

But then Richard Rohr’s insights help me see that all of this suffering and crucifixion language really is a different type of vicarious suffering and that it might be pointing me to a way of life for my own paler sufferings. Its not about something “out there” in the life of Christ or out there on the liturgical calendar. Its an iconic map that takes me into my soul; its about moving into my own wounds , vulnerabilities,, limitations---- to surrendering;
the hole of the soul., to die to my self.
Read this. And let it work on you, or in you.

Do you realize with what difficulty surrender will come to a fixing, managing mentality? There's nothing in that psyche prepared to understand the spiritual wisdom of surrender. All of the great world religions teach surrender. Yet most of us, until we go through the hole in our soul—our weak spot in the middle—just don't think surrender is necessary. But we have to face our limitations, it seems, in the interior world. That's our liberation theology. We must recognize our own poor man, our own abused woman, the oppressed part of ourselves that we hate, that we deny, that we're afraid of. That's the hole in our soul. It's the way through, maybe the only way, says the crucified Jesus.

from Breathing Under Water: Spirituality and the 12 Steps Richard Rohr

Now what does it mean to hear the words of Christ; "take up your cross and follow me..."
to die and rise with Christ!

Lenten Post Prayer

From Walter Rauschenbusch

O God, when our use of this world is over and we make room for others,
may we not leave anything ravished by our greed or spoiled by our ignorance,
but we hand on our common heritage fairer and sweeter through our use of it.
Amen

source unknown to me ,
I had it in my March 1983 journal notes

Lenten Post Cottonwood Prayer

My site meter reports that there is a person from Cottonwood who occasionally comes to the blog. So, today's post is a time of prayer for this person and the community of Cottonwood Mn.
Join me in the prayer............

Wednesday Lenten Post

From the Upper Room Daily Reflections:

THE BOTTOM OF THE SOUL may be in repose even while we are in many outward troubles, just as the bottom of the sea is calm, while the surface is strongly agitated.

- John Wesley
A Longing for Holiness

From pp. 62-63 of A Longing for Holiness: Selected Writings of John Wesley, edited by Keith Beasley-Topliffe. Copyright © 1997 by Upper Room Books

Comment...maybe I should check out the bottom of my soul now and then, and see what is stirring. A question sometimes asked in Methodist settings. "How is it with your soul?" Sometimes I am tempted to answer it by talking about things going on at church or in my life outwardly, but maybe the answer is below the surface?

Tues Feb 19 Lenten Post At the Nursing Home

What I saw at the Nursing Home

I stopped to see someone at the Bethany care center tonight and supper hour was still in progress. I was struck by the feel, or the reality, or even the spirit of that experience , people sitting next to others, around tables, slowly feeding someone next to them. So simple. So necessary. I was thankful for the view of the interaction. Are they volunteers, and staff; are they adult children feeding their frail fathers and mothers, a husband with a wife? Was that a grandchild?

When we were children, someone fed us. Life coming full circle. We need others. We need the daily attending of someone, with our spilling and shaking hands. Independence would have us starve. We need others to be with us in patience. And to fulfill that need is humanity at its best. It really is the essential human condition that we are able to disguise or deny for so much of our life. Community cannot exit without it.
Then after I made my visit, I noticed that the beautiful and spacious chapel, that evening, was being set up for a kind of bowling game. The pins were set up, and a long plastic runner formed an alley. Right down the center aisle. I have led worship services on that very spot. I have stood there for memorial services. Some voices of the church, over the years would have been appalled at just the thought of a worship space being used as a bowling alley. But it all seemed right. This seemed no less holy than the times when we sang the hymns, read the scriptures, prayed and preached the Word.
Community mixing ; happening, with attention again, , and care, maybe some laughter and encouragement, or just something out of the ordinary in a place where routine and long hours can be deadening. I am prayerfully thankful for those who minister there, with the people of those rooms and halls. It seemed so right to have that "activity”in the sanctuary space. Can a place of worship not be a place of community and the transcendence of forgetting the earthiness of time, that turns the ordinary into some other level of play? Reverence can be more largely defined. Thomas Merton reminded us that you cannot have God without having humanity.
I saw humanity there in that God space. Did I see God too in that fragile and complicated human space? I think that is what I saw at the nursing home.
It will be my Lenten prayer of thanks.

Monday Feb 18 Stone Houses Lenten Post

This is from Richard Rohr, another author I appreciate. You can subscribe to his daily email.

What can I do about his insight in this? I live in the the land of stone houses. But I can at least let the words poke into my door way... the stir to community and interdependence, the deception and lures of my private possessions? Something about simplicity? My sense of self? ....What do you think?
Read on:

Some people live without anything and have everything. The example that always comes to mind for me is in Africa. This little old black African man and I prayed together after a long session. He prayed with such tenderness, saying, "O Lord, help us never to move into stone houses." And everybody echoed, "Yes, Lord. Yes, Lord."
Afterward I asked the missionaries what he had meant. "Well," a priest said, "look at the villages. They're all door-less thatch huts. And so as long as you live a simple life in a thatch hut with no doors, you don't know where your family ends and where the next family begins. You move in and out of one another's lives, and it's all really one family. And there's no possessing, there's no mine and thine; it's ours. It's a world of community." "Once the first stone hut is built in a village," the missionary continued, "very quickly a door and locks are put on it. Immediately the world of mine and thine is created. The entire social worldview, the entire understanding of self, changes but… I'd say you can't see God very well if you spend too much time inside your stone house.

Richard Rohr A Spirituality of Subtraction