Notes from LifeCycles

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LifeCycles: A Testimonial

Through LifeCycles I have come to read the scriptures with the beginning of understanding. I have learned to understand the importance of the comfort and safety of home and the greater importance of being able to step beyond it to give and to receive, to welcome and to be welcomed. I have learned the role of ritual, the doing of small things with reverence and grace. I have heard of gratitude and I am grateful to have had the opportunity to listen to my fellow participants in LifeCycles. Now, if I can only begin to apply it ... I am waiting for a new round of LifeCycles to begin.

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A New Look at Lent

Becoming immersed in the nurturing community of St. PJ's seems to have launched me into a new place in my spiritual life. I find myself questioning childhood assumptions about the church calendar. What does Lent really mean to me? It's no longer about giving up candy. How do I want to spend these forty days preparing myself for Easter?

I have decided to commit the first hour of the day to reading and reflection on the season. In fact, my reading has already begun, and several days ago I was moved by this personal redefining of God, in a paragraph from Embracing the Beloved, by Stephen and Ondrea Levine:

When I was eleven years old, in summer camp, I saw framed on a New England farmhouse wall an aging embroidery which read, "God is Love." It seemed most bizarre at the time to my tiny Old Testament mind. But after thirty-five years of spiritual practice, no better definition arises. This is the God we seek: unconditioned love, the Beloved, our inherent vastness.

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Lent

When I was a child, I spoke as a child, I understood as a child..., but when I became an adult, I gave up childish things. For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face 1 Corinthians 13:11-12

How well I remember going through Lent as a child. It was a time when I vowed to do things to please God. Give up Chocolate - attend mass daily - put quarters in my mite box. Even so, I was uneasy. For there is something not quite right in hoping to excel in humility - in wanting God to see me as good (and better than others) - and to lose a little weight in the process. It was a child's view of a distant God whose favor had to be earned by acts of contrition and through one's own will. I was not very good at keeping Lent. It was in fact a humbling experience and often left me feeling unworthy. Where was God?

Many years have passed, my understanding of God has changed. I believe he is a God who hungers for connection and who is present in unknown ways. God was there as I attempted to keep a perfect Lent. I imagine that He was gently amused at my childish attempts to find him by forgoing chocolate. Certainly, He stood beside me as I struggled to be faithful with integrity - for this opened doors to understand Him in new ways. He was speaking to me through my failures and in the process bringing me nearer to Him.

In the passing of these years, I have taken on many responsibilities, have lost some of the urgency about my relationship with God, and can easily wrap myself in worldly concerns. However, I now know that Lenten discipline is not about small penances, but about opening space for God in our lives. The giving up is a way to open up space to be with God. Lent is a time to come, to listen, and to know Him in new ways.

Letting God in is not easy or predictable. It is a sacrifice far beyond giving up chocolate - for what it demands is that we give up familiar patterns and open ourselves to an Earthshaking God. Jesus left the security of wandering the countryside and teaching when he went to the mountain to be with God. When he came down, he was betrayed, defiled, and died. Even the resurrection did not bring back the world he knew before. No longer did he wash his sandy feet at the end of a long day or have a few moments with his friends. A call to a faithful Lent is a call to the wilderness where things are not familiar or easy - and entering the wilderness forces us to acknowledge that walking with God changes our lives. It is a venture that requires us to trust in God with our whole being.

Not entering the wilderness and not spending time with God also has consequences. I never come to the week of the passion without knowing how easy it would have been to be a member of the crowd that cried "Crucify Him". How in trying to maintain the order of the day, one can be blinded to God and justice and caught up in violence and sin. How many of the great prophets when called by God - said no not me, I am not good enough, I have other things to attend to? As we come to Ash Wednesday, we once again are called to respond to God's call to spend time with him. Accepting this call has its dangers, but ignoring it diminishes us.

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Placing Lent within the Whole Year

It is strange indeed to be writing thoughts about Lent during this time of Advent. The logistics of preparing the Epistle makes it possible to release the serial order of the liturgical year and float in the blending of the coming, the passion and the leaving of the Light of the World - all at the same time. Whoa!

I'm struck by following a thought of Harlon's that Advent is a time where we focus on what we are learning about God and God's coming, whereas during Lent, we are more focused on ourselves - our failings - the things about us that separate us from God. And Barbara speaks of Advent and Christmas as a time where we concentrate on God coming to us - and then we move into a time where we are aware of being lifted to God.

How can it be that one minute we unselfconsciously celebrate and welcome God truly believing that Christ's coming shows God's love for us, and the next minute be immersed in self-examination and repentance, pining for reconciliation with God? How can it be that we can lose ourselves in the simplicity and tenderness of watching (or participating in) the Christmas pageant, and the next minute be anguishing over the state of the world - and the way each of us is complicity in the inequities that cause so much violence and heartache?

Yet is not one of God's greatest gifts the enormous complexity of human experience and emotion, the vast sweep of feelings? It seems to me that the great challenge of life is to acknowledge and get to know all parts of ourselves: the light, darkness, good humor, kindness, disappointment, envy, faith, fear, meanness, nobility - the list is endless. As each new awareness comes, we offer it to God because it is simply too much for us to really understand or make sense out of.

The liturgical year provides an outline of sorts for this process. For me it is important to keep the whole year in mind as I experience each part - to remember that no part defines the whole. So I approach Lent with the idea of experiencing it fully and authentically while remembering that this crucified and suffering God in Christ also has come to earth as children in a pageant with sheep masks and angel wings.

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Lent as "Pre-Easter"

Lent, for me, is a time of introspection. We can go to the foot of the cross and learn the lessons of our imperfection. We can receive the ashes and be reminded of our mortality. We can spend time grieving the pains of our world. More recently, I've begun to see Lent as the season of "pre-Easter," a time of cleansing, preparation and renewed acceptance of the eternal light of the Christ.

ashes
pains
crosses
unending
shadows rise

pause to gasp
to grieve
the inhumanity
the places in so much need
out there and inside
those times we pass along the pain
instead of making way for new days

this time
this Lent
create a space to remember
to make shallow breath steady
to hollow ourselves out
to make way for the Light
of Truth.

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The Scent of Light

In the charming film called Chocolat, some French villagers are required to practice a Lenten denial of the flesh, a stern resistance to temptation, and a firm exclusion of all that might threaten a puritanical virtue. But a lovely purveyor of chocolates arrives in the village to offer a sweet and magical answer to that constricted notion of spiritual wellbeing. After she has engineered a Lent of strangely comic excess, the young priest sees the light. He declares that denial, resistance, and exclusion must give way to an Easter celebration of embracing, creating, and inclusion.

But must we wait for Easter for such a celebration? Perhaps it already inheres in a thoughtful Lenten practice. Lent is traditionally a time of "fasting and penitence," commemorating Jesus' fasting in the wilderness. But properly understood, fasting and penitence can lead to lightness and light.

This year, Lent will be for me a period of exploration. I'll abstain from television and newspapers and do some further reading in three books: Stephen Harrod Buhner's The Fasting Path, Thich Nhat Hanh's Creating True Peace, and Andrew Harvey's The Direct Path. These writers know that "fasting and penitence" can be a gentle discovery of one's appetites, addictions, distractions, and angers - a merciful process that may encourage the small and grasping mind to let go of its fears and widen to engage the divine heart of the universe.

For me, such gentle attention might be assisted by a modified juice fast and a schedule of meditation. I'll there follow the Buddhist sequence of the Five Mindfulness Trainings, the larger meanings of which Thich Nhat Hanh has expanded for the modern practitioner (pp. 73-75): Reverence for Life; Generosity; Sexual Responsibility; Deep Listening and Loving Speech; and Mindful Consumption.

As Thich Nhat Hanh says, these interrelated trainings "show us the reality of how to inter-be." One can easily find analogies in the teachings of Jesus, who understands that we are all members of a single Body. Andrew Harvey offers a similar expansion of the Mindfulness Trainings and provides some hints about specific procedures - including journal notations about one's discoveries in meditation, and prayers that may focus the attention (pp. 69-75).

This Lenten practice would aim at no willful denial, resistance, or exclusion. It would rather seek an increased alertness to what the poet Hafiz called "the scent of light" - an approach to the grace of insight and love, an Easter resurrection that is available to our deepest selves in all seasons.

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The Garden

Jesus must have felt weak,
there, in the garden,
when he left the three friends
he had brought with him,
and went to pray by himself.
Jesus must have needed
their presence and support.
Jesus must have felt weak,
Even Jesus.

Jesus must have hoped
not to have to go through with it,
to avoid the suffering he knew
was in store for him -
why else would he have prayed,
prayed alone and in agony,
not to have to drink that cup,
that bitter cup, if possible.
It is the man, Jesus, praying:
Father, if it be possible, take this cup from me . . .
And then we hear: but let it not be
according to my will but thine.
What enabled Jesus to pray like this?
It must have been the Holy Spirit
praying within him.

Yes, Jesus must have felt weak,
there, in the garden all alone,
with his friends falling asleep
and not being able to keep watch. . .
Jesus must have felt weak,
like we humans feel weak.
And then the Holy Spirit came
and gave him the strength he needed.
O Holy Spirit, pray within us as well,
pray in us when we are weak,
pray in us and give us strength.