Spiritual Practices of Lent

February 21, 2023

Beloved:
          Lent begins tomorrow.  Though not practiced in my Baptist childhood home, I knew all about it.  The Catholic kids across the street gave up candy and afternoon television.  They always ate fish on Fridays.  Obviously I didn’t know all about it.
          Lent lasts forty days, tomorrow until Easter (April 9th), minus the Sundays, the little Easters.  Lent is a spiritual practice of self-denial with the intention of opening space within our lives for reflection on Jesus’ great sacrifice on our behalf.  I see now how candy and cartoons are a useful catechism for the practice of self-denial.  My childhood friends were daily aware of the vows they had taken, even if they were not much changed in spirit.  Truth be told, spiritual change in my own life comes in the smallest of increments.  I can only see it looking back.  I can sometimes realize it in a swell of hope or a boost of courage.  We practice at Lent what we ought to practice all the time – a daily life more dependent on Jesus than on whatever fix we reach for when we itch to fill some empty space within our hearts and minds.
          I am learning to sit in pain without fighting it, without constantly trying to undo or fix it.  But just to sit with it and believe Jesus sits here with me.  It’s awful.  I don’t like it.  Great is the temptation to fill the space in a hundred different ways.  A good deal of the pain is the uncertainty of what will happen tomorrow, next month, a year from now.  None of which is knowable today.  Yet today we must sit with the worry of it, learning to keep heart and mind and soul within the confines of today.  We are given the strength to manage what comes between sunrise and sunset today – but no more.  I fail constantly, because this is really, really hard, and in comparison I am very, very weak.
          I suppose Lent teaches us one essential truth – that our need of Jesus is as essential to our humanity as drawing breath and sleeping.  We cannot do this life alone, on our own strength – no matter how much or with what distractions we may fortify ourselves against the truth that we are weak and He is strong.  I invite you to let the truth be the truth with which you and I sit this Lenten season, checking our desire for distraction, doing our best to stay put and see what Jesus will do within and among us.  I am grateful to be on the way, practicing the faith with you all.

~ peace & prayers, 
pastor annette

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