Half Way There

Well here we are – about half way through Lent.  I’ve learned something again for the umpteenth time – some thing I have always known – I am a sinner.  On Ash Wednesday, I wrote about how Lent can be like a mirror in an unavoidable place that shows us an image of who we really are.  As of today, Lent 2011 has succeeded. 

As I set out on my Lenten journey, I promised to write a reflection for this blog each day.  In that, I have failed.  I promised myself that I would exercise each day to improve my health.  In that, I have failed.  I promised not to take sweets.  In that, I have failed.  Without going into much more detail, I can safely say that in every discipline that I undertook for this Lent, I have failed. 

That might be cause for great discouragement. 

However, the opposite is true.  My failures at these undertakings is only the mirror showing me that on my own, with my own strength, I cannot attain the life that God calls me to live.  My failures starkly remind me that without grace, I can do nothing well. 

It took three weeks to get here.  Now I can get to the business of letting God be God in my life.  I can finally put away the fantasy that I can do all these things on my own.  Am I throwing in the towel on my Lenten disciplines?  No way.  Only now, I have learned again that I can only succeed by the grace of God.

Hail, Mary, full of grace!

The prayer, "Hail Mary," is more than the cry of desparation of a quarterback on the football field as he lets loose a high, long pass that may or may not result is tremendous gain. "Hail, Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee" recalls the greeting of the angel Gabriel when announcing the plan of God to make Mary of Nazareth the vessel that would bear the world its Savior. This announcement, or "Annuciation," is recounted for us in the Gospel of Luke. On this day, exectly nine months before the celebration of Christmas, marks the conception of Christ in the womb of a simple Jewish girl from Nazareth. It recalls not only the announcement (which may have been quite startling to a young maiden) but also the deep confidence and trust that this woman had in the God of her ancestors. With confidence, she responds, "I am the handmaiden of the Lord, let it be done to me as you say."

We celebrate this day to call to mind that sense of confidence. It couldn't have been easy for Mary to contemplate what lay ahead for her. She was not yet married, yet she would be with child in a culture that looked on such events with great disdain. Having apparently violated the terms of her betrothal to Joseph, she would have been an embarassment and grave disappointment to her parents. Joseph would walk away from her. She would be shunned by her community. She would be labeled a "loose woman" for the rest of her life.

Still her answer was clear and unequival, "Let it be done." Interesting, too, is the fact that God did not foist his will upon her. He had chosen her and it would remain with her to decide whether this momentous action would take place. God had placed the salvation of the world in the hands of this youngster. What inner character enabled her to undertake this tremendous work. Bearing and rearing children is not easy in any age and is daunting even for adults that have planned for it. Having been betrothed to Joseph, Mary certainly knew that having children was in her future. But now? Even before she was married?

How many others did Gabriel approach but said, "No. Not me. That's not for me. Go away." Was Mary the only one? We will never know. But it is interesting to think about how special this particular woman was. She is the model for faith, like her ancestor Abraham, who had confidence and trust in God so total that he risked absoultely everything to answer God's call.

Today, the Church asks us to examine our own reponse to the call of God. Each of us, though not asked to become the God-bearer to a broken world, is called to accomplish something for God. Lent is the time when we take the time to search our hearts for what that might be. How willing will we be to say, "Let it be done to me as you say" when we discover what that is?

How Suffering Can Teach

For many years, the well-known Dutch priest and theologian Henri Nouwen pastored the residents and staff of the Daybreak Community in Toronto, Canada. Daybreak is a residential facility for the mentally challenged. The residents face many difficulties: savage inner voices, physical paralysis, epileptic seizures, disordered speech and thinking. The residence is filled with what many of us would conceive as frightening, even repellent, conditions.

Nouwen knew about revulsion. But he also came to know something important: those whose illness is visible teach us about our own brokenness. The residents of Daybreak might have been visily limited, but all of us are limited in one way or another. Often limited by invisible disabilities, we are bound by our secrets every bit as firmly as Nouwen's parishioners were bound by obvious weaknesses. "After years of living with people with mental disabilities," he wrote, "I hae become deeply aware of my own sorrow-filled heart."

Suffering can do one of two things: It can cause us to close down, or it can help us to open up. We close down in a vain attempt to protect ourselves from further pain, but it is a useless attempt. The way of human life is not the avoidance of pain. The way of a truly human life is to move through pain into love, to see ourselves in the suffering of others and others in our own suffering. This is one reason we reflect so carefully upon the passion and death of Christ during the season of Lent. As Isaiah's "Suffering Servant," Jesus shows us a truly human path.

For more on Henri Nouwen, visit www.henrinouwen.org/

Caring Listening

I obviously find myself on the road very often. I drive back and forth between my home in Harrisburg and the parish in Lewistown. Add to that an occasional trip to our second home in Delaware and you see why I leasing a car will never make financial sense to me. When the weather is nice, I often drive with my windows down and my music playing very loudly. Music and listening to music is one of my favorite activities. I am especially fond of classical music and having added satellite radio to the mix has helped to broaden what I actually listen to.

I’m used to driving alone with my music as my company. Even with others in the car, I’m mostly silent. Being used to silence is a very important thing. Talking all the time means you never spend any time listening. Listening, in my opinion, is a lost art in our society. We spend too much time talking and not enough time listening. While I was in seminary, I had to attend mandatory formation sessions that centered on "active listening." Actually, I thought having sessions on active listening was ridiculous. Who would need such a lesson in the first place? Weren’t we all capable of listening? As we were taught about the importance of eye contact, nodding your head, and other actions, I found myself being agitated more and more by the sessions. One time, when it came time for questions from the seminarians, I indignantly raised my hand and asked whether all this wasn merely a trick to convince someone that you care about what is being said? In my mind, all these tactics were just fixes to what the initial element needed to be: caring.

Spending your time listening to just figure out what you’re going to say next is really not listening. Even those who engage in forensic debates will tell you that to succeed you need to carefully listen to and then assess your opponent’s argument. Caring about what is being said can be the root of change: wth friends who need advice, with parents trying to help adult children, with political discourse. It’s not just about giving your opinion. It's about caring listening.

Caring listening is also how I’ve come to see prayer. A lot of people pray out loud or silently to God, but how many of us really listen to what God has to say? I’ll be the first to admit that I don’t have much patience when it comes to listening for what God has to say. I, like other people (and many important figures in the Scriptures), would like a more timely answer. "What exactly is it that you want me to learn?" "What exactly is your idea of becoming better through this situation?"

It’s especially hard to listen to God when I think that God is just not paying attention. Transitions associated with becoming the new rector to St. Mark's provides plenty of opportunity for me to spend time praying, "Just tell me what to do." I do believe God is paying attention, and in the spirit of active listening, I guess I should start paying more attention.

He descended into hell.

At our midweek healing services here at St. Mark’s, we use the Apostles’ Creed during the Eucharist.  For some reason today, the phrase “he descended into hell” struck me with particular force.  At the same time, I had just been praying for an individual who has been struggling mightily with multiple addictions.  I am no expert, but I would say he has an addictive personality and is need of great healing. 

Countless thousands of people are making the journey through recovery.  I believe that these people truly experience hell in a way that few of us ever will.  They have lost homes, marriages, careers, the respect of their children and friends, and sometimes almost life itself. 

During recovery, most programs teach their clients to pray.  The model prayer is a simple one.  We know it as the Serenity Prayer.  The prayer is meant to remind the person in recovery that they need to abandon the fiction that they are in control of their behavior and that, in reality, they may actually be being controlled by their behavior.  People become convinced that t only a higher power can save them.  Many of these people come to discover that this higher power is, for them, the God they came to know as part of their own religious heritage.  Many individuals rediscover their Church or synagogue after a prolonged absence from religious observance of any kind.  More often than not, this follows a bit of healing connected with very old and deep anger at “organized religion.” 

So much of the religious teaching that people absorb as children is intricately interwoven with the stresses and sorrows of their own families.  Like everything else received by children, religious imagination needs to grow and deepen.  You don’t do most of the things now that you did as a child; it stands to reason that one’s faith and those things that support it will change, too.  The knowledge of having been raised from the living death of addiction is as good a place as any to start and a model of resurrection faith. 

Finding the time

Almost everybody I know is much too busy, yours truly included. Finding quiet time alone is hard. “I’m just too busy to pray,” I will often hear.  It makes busy people feel guilty, at first, to sit in silence when they could be doing something.  It is important to remember, though, that when you sit in contemplative silence you are doing something: you’re tending your soul.  You’re working on the framework in which you live your life.  You need some time to listen to the Spirit.  In my experience, the time I have taken to do this has never ruined mu schedule.  “Deus providebit” (God will provide) I tell myself when I am worried about time.  And God always does.  Just as a laidback graduate school classmate from the South chided me, “You Northerners need to learn – when God made time, he made lots of it!”

Perhaps you will not be sitting motionless is a quiet room.  It may be that the time God provides will be time that you used to use in another way: staring into the distance while a passenger, or during exercise, or in a waiting room.  Washing dishes. Taking a shower.  It is often true that the mind and soul are quite available while the body is doing something repetitive.  This elegant economy should gratify even the most driven among us: you can put your previously unused spiritual energy into a more focused use while performing mindless tasks.  So even the most mundane activity can become holy, if it is accompanied by prayer. 


If you need a quiet place to pray, St. Mark's Church is open daily from 8 AM until 1 PM for just this purpose.  Stop in.  Take a breath . . . and hear God's voice.

Looking toward new life

"Lent" comes from an Old English word meaning springtime. In societies based in agriculture, such as those of the Eastern Mediterranean and Europe were until recently, early spring was the time when food was in the shortest supply.

Most domestic animals, except for breeding stock were slaughtered in the fall because not enough feed grain could be safely stored for all animals to survive the winter.  By early spring, although fish was still available, supplies of preserved meats (frozen or salted) began to run out, and warmer temperatures threatened to spoil what remained.

As the winter grain crops grew and animals gave birth and raised their young, the time of scarcity started to wane. The end of this period was often celebrated with a feast offering the first fruits of the spring harvest to God. The Jewish Passover incorporates these elements of this festival: a shepherd’s sacrifice and feast of young lambs and a farmer’s feast of unleavened bread made from the spring barley harvest. Because of the connection between the occurrence of the Passover and the resurrection, Easter was set to sprintime (in the northern hemisphere).

In his book, Cleansing the Temple, Theodore Wessling reminds us: “As a period of purification, Lent is not merely a period of bodily fasting. It is a period of general re- adjustment, of thorough renovation from the outer spheres of life down to the roots of its innermost fibers. We have only to glance at the chain of prayers which runs through the Lenten liturgy from Ash Wednesday to Easter to see the meaning of Lent. It is a chastisement of the body in order that the soul may grow. It is purification and liberation. It is a cure, and the fasts are meant to be medicinal. It is a sacred observance, nay, it is direct sanctification. It is the only route to freedom and fulfillment, for it loosens the grip of evil and leads us, worn and weary, to full and wholesome restoration.”

How does will our Lenten observance allow us to give birth to new life - the reason for the season at Easter?