a journey through lent

day 1 – Ash Wednesday

There is confidence everywhere in Ash Wednesday, yet that does not mean unmixed and untroubled security.

The confidence of the Christian is always a confidence in spite of darkness and risk, in the presence of peril, with every evidence of possible disaster…

Once again, Lent is not just a time for squaring conscious accounts: but for realizing what we had perhaps not seen before.

The light of Lent is given us to help us with this realization.

Nevertheless, the liturgy of Ash Wednesday is not focussed on the sinfulness of the penitent but on the mercy of God.

The question of sinfulness is raised precisely because this is a day of mercy, and the just do not need a saviour.

Thomas Merton

day 2

Fasting is giving up something to open up a space in the hope that the space will be filled by God.

Consider setting aside time each day where you are free from the messages of the world.

Ask God to speak to you; read the daily readings; take the bit that has most jumped out at you (whether you liked it or it irritated you) and sit with it awhile.

Then pray to God about it.

Thomas Merton, The Wisdom of the Desert

day 3

Always, wherever, whatever, however

When I am able to resist
For once the constant pressure of failure to exist,
Let me remember
That truly to be man is to be man aware of Thee
And unafraid to be. So help me God.

David Gascoyne

I can stick artificial flowers on this tree that will not flower, or I can create the conditions in which the tree is likely to flower naturally. I may have to wait longer for my real flowers but they are the only true ones.

John Fowles, The Aristos

day 4

It is time to take seriously what Christianity has always proclaimed: that this Mysterious Presence we call "God" is everywhere and is beyond all our human concepts.

It is time to make a significant shift in our understanding of "God."

It is time to shift from notions of a deity to an understanding and appreciation of the Divine Presence always here, always and everywhere active in an expanding universe and in the evolution of life on this planet.

Michael Morwood on the Divine Presence
 

day 5

No matter how much light I carry within me,
there will always be times of feeling lost,
being confused, seeking direction.
It is the way of the human heart.
Joyce Rupp

The Lord is with me; I will not be afraid.
What can mere mortals do to me?
Psalm 118:6

day 6

He has shown you, O man, what is good, and what does the LORD require of you?
To act justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with you God
Micah 6:8

Integrity is doing the right thing even when no one is watching.
C.S. Lewis

As we endeavour to end the wrongs, we musn't forget to do what's right.
Tony Kirwan

day 7

To love is to be vulnerable.
C.S. Lewis

Defend the cause of the weak and fatherless;
maintain the rights of the poor and oppressed
Psalm 82:3

I tell you this to break your heart,
by which I mean only that it break open and
never close again to the rest of the world.
Mary Oliver

day 8

I am not what has happened to me. I am what I choose to become.
Carl Jung

Those who deny freedom to others deserve it not for themselves, and, under a just God cannot retain it .
Abraham Lincoln

Our deepest calling is to grow into our own authentic self-hood, whether or not it conforms to some image of who we ought to be. As we do so, we will not only find the joy that every human being seeks—we will also find our path of authentic service in the world.
Parker J. Palmer

day 9

Dare to enter the darkness to bring another into the light.
Tony Kirwan

I do not believe this darkness will endure.
J.R.R. Tolkein

day 10

Let me keep my distance, always, from those who think they have the answers.
Let me keep company always with those who say “Look!” and laugh in astonishment,
and bow their heads.
Mary Oliver

Community is that place where the person you least want to live with always lives.
And when that person moves away, someone else arises to take his or her place.
Parker J. Palmer

day 11

During Lent try to pause more, listening deeper for and to God.
A verse to memorize this month is:

“Then Christ will make his home in your hearts as you trust in him.”
Ephesians 3:17 (NLT) Pray that Christ will make his home in your heart.

Every moment and every event of every man’s life on earth
plants something in his soul.
Thomas Merton

day 12

The truth of the matter is, we all come to prayer with a tangled mass of motives—altruistic and selfish, merciful and hateful, loving and bitter.

Frankly, this side of eternity we will never unravel the good from the bad, the pure from the impure.

God is big enough to receive us with all our mixture.
Richard Foster

day 13

Sometimes I think of life as a big wagon wheel with many spokes. In the middle is the hub.

Often in ministry, it looks like we are running around the rim trying to reach everybody.

But God says, “Start in the hub; live in the hub. Then you will be connected with all the spokes, and you won’t have to run so fast.”

Henri J. M. Nouwen

day 14

Lent need not be a somber season, a time of mourning for goods we have been obligated to relinquish. Rather I think it can be a joyful season, in the spirit in which St. Francis told Brother Leo: "Above all the graces and all the gifts of the Holy Spirit which Christ grants to his friends, is the grace of overcoming oneself, and accepting willingly, out of love for Christ, all suffering, injury, discomfort and contempt."

Lent is a time in which we regain a healthy relationship with tangible pleasures. By our willingness to give up the good things of the world, we reverse the bondage of avoidance, and become free to enjoy them as generous gifts of God.
Ed Rogers

When you fast, do not look somber as the hypocrites do, for they disfigure their faces to show others they are fasting. Truly I tell you, they have received their reward in full. But when you fast, put oil on your head and wash your face, so that it will not be obvious to others that you are fasting, but only to your Father, who is unseen; and your Father, who sees what is done in secret, will reward you.
Matthew 6:16-18 NIV

day 15

Nothing, how little so ever it be, if it is suffered for God's sake,
can pass without merit in the sight of God.
Thomas a Kempis

Whoever wishes to be my follower must deny his very self,
take up his cross each day, and follow in my steps.
Luke 9:23

Everything in life has its own time. There is time to celebrate and there is time to mourn. This is the time for reflection and transformation. Let us look within and change into what we ought to be.
Aaron Saul

day 16

Lent is like a long 'retreat' during which we can turn back into ourselves and listen to the voice of God....
Pope Benedict XVI

“Even now,” declares the LORD, “return to me with all your heart, with fasting and weeping and mourning.” Rend your heart and not your garments. Return to the LORD your God, for he is gracious and compassionate, slow to anger and abounding in love, and he relents from sending calamity. Who knows? He may turn and relent and leave behind a blessing—grain offerings and drink offerings for the LORD your God.
Joel 2:12-14

day 17

The beginning of love is to let those we love be perfectly themselves, and not to twist them to fit our own image. Otherwise we love only the reflection of ourselves we find in them.
Thomas Merton

God loved us before he made us; and his love has never diminished and never shall.
Julian of Norwich

day 18

Someone I loved once gave me a box full of darkness. It took me years to understand that this too, was a gift.
Mary Oliver

Hardships often prepare ordinary people for an extraordinary destiny.
C.S Lewis

day 19

All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.
J.R.R Tolkein

What each must seek in his life never was on land or sea.
It is something out of his own unique potentiality for experience,
something that never has been
and never could have been experienced by anyone else.
Joseph Campbell

Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?
Mary Oliver

day 20

The goal of life is to make your heartbeat match the beat of the universe,
to match your nature with Nature.
Joseph Campbell

Lent stimulates us to let the Word of God penetrate our life
and in this way to know the fundamental truth:
who we are, where we come from, where we must go,
what path we must take in life...

day 21

We do not think ourselves into a new way of living
as much as we live ourselves into new ways of thinking.
Richard Rohr

“Yet even now, says the Lord,
repent and return to me with all your heart”
Joel 2:13

In the last analysis, the individual person is responsible for living his own life
and for 'finding himself.' If he persists in shifting his responsibility to somebody else,
he fails to find out the meaning of his own existence.
Thomas Merton

day 22

I don't know exactly what a prayer is. I do know how to pay attention,
how to fall down into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.

Tell me, what else should I have done? Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?

Mary Oliver

day 23

Indeed, the truth that many people never understand, until it is too late, is that the more you try to avoid suffering, the more you suffer, because smaller and more insignificant things begin to torture you, in proportion to your fear of being hurt. The one who does most to avoid suffering is, in the end, the one who suffers most: and his suffering comes to him from things so little and so trivial that one can say that it is no longer objective at all.

Thomas Merton from The Seven Storey Mountain

day 24

As Lent is the time for greater love, listen to Jesus' thirst...'Repent and believe' Jesus tells us. What are we to repent? Our indifference, our hardness of heart. What are we to believe? Jesus thirsts even now, in your heart and in the poor—He knows your weakness. He wants only your love, wants only the chance to love you.
Teresa of Calcutta

Believing in the resurrection does not just mean assenting to a dogma and noting a historical fact. It means participating in this creative act of God's ... Resurrection is not a consoling opium, soothing us with the promise of a better world in the hereafter. It is the energy for a rebirth of this life. The hope doesn't point to another world. It is focused on the redemption of this one."
Jürgen Moltmann

Some people think that having ash on your forehead is ridiculous. But I am neither ashamed nor afraid because the ashes remind me that I have to someday pass away and reunite with my creator.
Walter Buns

day 25

For most of my life I have struggled to find God, to know God, to love God. I have tried hard to follow the guidelines of the spiritual life—pray always, work for others, read the Scriptures—and to avoid the many temptations to dissipate myself. I have failed many times but always tried again, even when I was close to despair.

Now I wonder whether I have sufficiently realized that during all this time God has been trying to find me, to know me, and to love me.

The question is not “How am I to find God?” but “How am I to let myself be found by him?” The question is not “How am I to know God?” but “How am I to let myself be known by God?”

And, finally, the question is not “How am I to love God?” but “How am I to let myself be loved by God?” God is looking into the distance for me, trying to find me, and longing to bring me home.

Henri J. M. Nouwen

day 26

A growing season
Lent is not an event.
It is not something that happens to us.

It is at most a microcosm of what turns out to be a lifelong journey to the center of the self.

The purpose of Lent is to confront us with ourselves in a way that’s conscious and purposeful, that enables us to deal with the rest of life well. It is not a “penitential season.”

It is a growing season.
It requires us to determine what is worth dying for in our own lives
and what it may be necessary for us to become if we really want to live.

Joan Chittister

day 27

     Six months ago I lived the simple life of a pilgrim, walking 450 miles on the Camino de Santiago in northern Spain. During those seven weeks all I did each day was walk toward St. James Cathedral in Santiago. I didn’t have to hurry madly to get there, pit myself against the walking pace of other pilgrims, or worry if my clothes were fashionable. I had just one main thing to do: walk.

     It took 10 days before my distracted self finally “just walked.” From then on, little else occupied my mind and heart. It was the most focused and free I have ever been.

     Since returning home, I see how easy it is to succumb to the subtle cravings of my superficially-oriented culture. It seduces me to clutter up my life, dress in a certain way, be knowledgeable on every subject, scurry around as busily as everyone else, and work in a frenetic fashion. When I give in to these things I am thrown off balance. I lose my peace and sense of inner direction. I lack clarity in my spiritual goals, forget the truths preached by Jesus, and experience frustrating days of self-orientation.

     Lent is a time to clear away the cultural debris that disorients me on the Christian path. The Lenten acts of deprivation I choose are of little value unless they help my mind and heart to be more attentive and focused on one thing only: to walk the gospel message—to love as Jesus loved. All else is secondary.
Joyce Rupp

day 28

Spiritual reading is not only reading about spiritual people or spiritual things. It is also reading spiritually, that is, in a spiritual way! Reading in a spiritual way is reading with a desire to let God come closer to us. . . .

"The purpose of spiritual reading, however, is not to master knowledge or information, but to let God's Spirit master us. Strange as it may sound, spiritual reading means to let ourselves be read by God! "Spiritual reading is reading with an inner attentiveness to the movement of God's Spirit in our outer and inner lives. With that attentiveness, we will allow God to read us and to explain to us what we are truly about."

Henri J. M. Nouwen

day 29

Patience asks us to live the moment to the fullest, to be completely present to the moment, to taste the here and now, to be where we are. When we are impatient we try to get away from where we are. We behave as if the real thing will happen tomorrow, later and somewhere else. Let's be patient and trust that the treasure we look for is hidden in the ground on which we stand.
Bread for the Journey

We are so obsessed with doing that we have no time and no imagination left for being. As a result, men are valued not for what they are but for what they do or what they have - for their usefulness.
Thomas Merton

day 30

Each of us has the capacity for great good and that is what makes God say it was well the risk to bring us into existence.

Extraordinarily, God the omnipotent One depends on us, puny, fragile, vulnerable as we may be, to accomplish God's purposes for good, for justice, for forgiveness and healing and wholeness.

God has no one but us. St. Augustine of Hippo has said, "God without us will not as we without God cannot."

A rustic Russian priest was accosted by a brash young physicist who rehearsed all the reasons for atheism and arrogantly went on, "Therefore I do not believe in God."

The little priest, not put off at all, replied quietly, "Oh, it doesn't matter. God believes in you."

God believes in us. God depends on us to help make this world all God wants it to be.

Desmond Tutu

day 31

What should I do first, God?
Should I eat or exercise or read this morning's news?

Should I write the thing, or tidy the thing, or build the thing?
Should I apologize to someone or thank someone or tell someone I love them?
Should I organize or resist or weep?
Should I rake or shovel or plant?
Should I make love or make up or make do?
Should I drive or walk or ride?
Should I seek or find or hide?
Should I shop or pack or plan?
Should I lean in or dig out or lift up?

Or should I sit?

Should I look out the window
with no word, no action -
just my eyes and your world
just my breath and your Breath?

Amen.

Jennifer Garrison Brownell

day 32

It is always an act of faith to trust silence, because it is the strangest combination of you and not-you of all. It is deep, quiet conviction, which you are not able to prove to anyone else—and you have no need to prove it, because the knowing is so simple and clear. Silence is both humble in itself and humbling to the recipient. Silence is often a momentary revelation of your deepest self, your true self, and yet a self that you do not yet know. Spiritual knowing is from a God beyond you and a God that you do not yet fully know.

The question is always the same: "How do you let them both operate as one—and trust them as yourself?" Such brazenness is precisely the meaning of faith, and why faith is still somewhat rare, compared to religion.

Richard Rohr

day 33

When I’m sailing on the Atlantic Ocean, I often use a GPS, a Global Positioning System.
It lets me know where I am and where to steer to reach my destination.

We all have a GPS inside us, a God Positioning System: the heart.
When the heart is attuned, it will allow us to perceive in a whole different way.

The egoic, binary operating system perceives by separating
and differentiating things from each other.

The heart’s perception is pattern oriented.
It perceives the whole and then discerns its own place within that whole.

Cynthia Bourgeault

day 34

“The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting—
it has been found difficult and left untried.”
G. K. Chesterton

There are two ways of spreading light:
to be the candle or the mirror that reflects it.
Edith Wharton

It is better to light a candle than curse the darkness.
Eleanor Roosevelt

day 35

"Why do you pray?" he asked me, after a moment.

Why did I pray? A strange question. Why did I live? Why did I breathe?

"I don't know why," I said, even more disturbed and ill at ease. "I don't know why."

After that day I saw him often. He explained to me with great insistence that every question possessed a power that did not lie in the answer.

"Man raises himself toward God by the questions he asks Him," he was fond of repeating.

"That is the true dialogue. Man questions God and God answers. But we don't understand His answers. We can't understand them. Because they come from the depths of the soul, and they stay there until death. You will find the true answers, Eliezer, only within yourself!"

"And why do you pray, Moshe?" I asked him.

"I pray to the God within me that He will give me the strength to ask Him the right questions."

Elie Wiesel

day 36

If we will be quiet and ready enough,
we shall find compensation in every disappointment.
Henry David Thoreau

Remember that sometimes not getting what you want
is a wonderful stroke of luck.
Dalai Lama

The word 'happy' would lose its meaning
if it were not balanced by sadness.
Carl Jung

day 37

Prayer is not a narrowly private activity; it is about your belonging in the body of Christ, and in the family of humanity.

If you understand what is going on when you pray, then the world changes.

And if in prayer you are gradually becoming attuned to the will and purpose of God, then the divine power that comes into you is bound to find its outlet in this healing of relations.

That is not to say that you pray in order to be a nicer person, or so that justice and reconciliation will happen.

You pray because Christ is in you. And if that is really happening, then the sort of things you can expect to see developing around you are justice and reconciliation.

Rowan Williams

day 38

There are two ways of meeting difficulties.
You alter the difficulties or you alter yourself to meet them.
Phyllis Bottome

This is a good sign, having a broken heart.
It means we have tried for something.
Elizabeth Gilber

day 39

Jesus was not brought down by atheism and anarchy. He was brought down by law and order allied with religion, which is always a deadly mix. Beware those who claim to know the mind of God and are prepared to use force, if necessary, to make others conform. Beware those who cannot tell God's will from their own. Temple police are always a bad sign. When chaplains start wearing guns and hanging out at the sheriff's office, watch out. Someone is about to have no king but Caesar.

This is a story that can happen anywhere at anytime, and we are as likely to be the perpetrators as the victims. I doubt that many of us will end up playing Annas, Caiaphas or Pilate, however. They may have been the ones who gave Jesus the death sentence, but a large part of him had already died before they ever got to him—the part Judas killed off, then Peter, then all those who fled. Those are the roles with our names on them—not the enemies but the friends....

No one knows what Judas said. In John's Gospel he does not say a word, but where he stands says it all. After he has led some 200 Roman soldiers and the temple police to the secret garden where Jesus is praying, Judas stands with the militia. Even when Jesus comes forward to identify himself, Judas does not budge. He is on the side with the weapons and the handcuffs, and he intends to stay there.

Or maybe it was not his own safety that motivated him. Maybe he just fell out of love with Jesus. That happens sometimes. One day you think someone is wonderful and the next day he says or does something that makes you think twice. He reminds you of the difference between the two of you and you start hating him for that—for the difference—enough to begin thinking of some way to hurt him back.—Barbara Brown Taylor

day 40

"The Only Spirit upsets us because it moves us, it makes us walk, it pushes the Church forward.  We want to calm down the Holy Spirit. We want to tame it and this is wrong." said Pope Francis.

At the same time, I know that I am so often just like everyone else in my resistance to the Spirit, in my fear of being pushed forward.

That's because the Spirit is about change, movement, wind. The Spirit creates change and makes change the only constant. And that is, at times, scary.

Throughout my life, as I looked forward into the darkness of the future, I have never known where I was going or where I was being led.

Often I have been nervous and insecure about the next step in my life. It has always felt like stepping into the void. But in retrospect, my life seems like a straight line leading from moment to moment...

After all these years of praying and meditating, asking for the guidance of the Spirit, trusting the Spirit is the only way forward. I must let the Spirit change me.

Sister Simone Campbell