The Invitation

Today begins the celebration of Lent.

For almost two thousand years, Christians have observed this time as a 40 day journey intended to help us return to God, return to ourselves, return to each other and return to our world. It hearkens back to Jesus’ 40 days in the desert and Israel’s 40 years in the wilderness.

The assumption of Lent is that we all have drifted, all have forgotten, all have lost our way somehow – individually and collectively.  Lent calls us back.  Through ancient disciplines like prayer, fasting and almsgiving we strive to release and let go of what has accumulated in our lives and try to commit more fully to practices that reconnect us and help us remember.

Lent is meant to be a time of clarification. Of purification. Of disorientation. Of reckoning. Of surrender.

Even now, says the LORD, return to me with your whole heart

The ashes we receive today remind us of our mortality and radical dependence on God and are meant to re-place us (meaning we find our appropriate place in the created order). They urge us to live more fully and love more freely.

During the next 40 days, we will be posting a daily blog as one way to help you to connect and re-center.  We will offer suggestions and reflections along the way. Feel free to comment and add your own suggestions and reflections, as we’d like this to become a collective sharing and learning community.

And, there are many ways to observe this time of Lent. We hope that you find practices that suit you, stretch you and center you. That could include “giving up” certain things. It could include “adding” certain things to your life. Whatever you do, strive to do it with joy. And if you are trying to say “No” to something, my hope is that it is because you are trying to say a deeper “Yes” to something else.

Thanks for being on this journey together.  May we all find ways to become more fully alive during this time and bring that energy into all we do.

I often like to use certain lines from the daily scriptures to create a poem of sorts that might serve as a reflective prayer.  Here’s one for today:

(If you want to see the daily readings of each day, I recommend going to www.usccb.org. And because people often ask, I generally utilize a translation of the gospels called The Message but lately have also been using one called the First Nations Version)