This week, we’re going back in the archives to a piece written by parishioner Marcia Luce in Lent 2011. Marcia died in November but I think she would be OK with us spending some more time with this! With Palm Sunday this week, we’re finishing our Lenten journey, so it seemed like a good time to look back at the last 40 days and see where we’ve been. Thanks to Sue Burkart who reminded me of this great piece.
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When I was younger, I was often confused about Lent. Oh, I knew about the forty days and that you were supposed to give up something and that you had to go to church a lot during Holy Week. It didn’t seem very important but I knew that it was supposed to be important. Over the years, I have learned a few more things.
In her book, A Clearing Season, Sara Parsons writes, “Lent is not all about penitence or misdeeds or guilt. It is a time of introspection, true, but its ultimate purpose lies beyond penitence. In essence, Lent serves as our annual invitation to come closer to God. It provides a time to look at our lives and ourselves not so we can criticize ourselves harshly but so we can identify the obstructions that keep us from God. What keeps us from feeling the presence of the divine in our every day? How do we hide from God and why? Lent gives us a chance to look at such obstructions and to move them gently away so we can come closer to the Love that gives us life, the Love whose triumph we will celebrate on Easter morning.”
“Who can separate from the love of Christ? For I am persuaded that neither death nor life, nor angels, nor principalities or powers, nor things present nor things to come, nor height nor depth, nor any other created thing shall be able to separate us from the love of God which is in Christ Jesus our Lord”. (Romans 8). It is only we ourselves that keep us from God. We set up the barriers that keep us from hearing his voice.
Lent gives us time to look at ourselves, to see the things that keep us from the love of God and to start to do something about them-a time to look at where we have been and a time to think about where we want to go in our spiritual lives. Jesus spent 40 days in the wilderness wrestling with Satan and the demons. Our job during Lent is to wrestle with our own demons and sinfulness. Christ’s message is new life and forgiveness. That means me and it also means you. It is a time of regret, but can also be a time of joy, a time of helping others, of allowing others to help us, a time of forgiving ourselves and of allowing God to speak directly to us. If we think of the space between us and God as a forest, our job during Lent is to clear the obstructions, to clear an open space where we can live more freely and communicate more clearly with God. This is a time when we must set aside a few minutes every day to pray and to listen to God’s voice.
May we each have a meaningful and successful Lent and find ourselves in a closer relationship with God.