Wednesday in the First Week of Lent

"For we have become partners of Christ, if only we hold our first confidence firm to the end. As it is said, 'Today, if you hear his voice, do not harden your hearts.'" (Hebrews 3:14-15)

I'm struck by the phrase "partners of Christ." I think sometimes Christians regard Jesus as being superhuman, as having powers and abilities far beyond our own, as perfect before God in a way we could never be. Jesus plays a unique role in God's work of salvation, to be sure. But I think that regarding Jesus as superhuman in the long run does a disservice to the Good News. It puts Christ on a pedestal, as it were, so that our notion of him becomes so high and mighty that we can see no real connection between him and us. At the same time, it encourages us to regard ourselves as completely passive, as sinful and unable to do any good, as mere recipients of the good that Jesus does on our behalf before God -- and again we can see no real connection between him and us. But creating a living connection between him and us is the reason Christ became incarnate: bridging the gap between human and divine is the reason Jesus lives. So thinking of Jesus as exclusive Savior and ourselves as passive recipients of salvation ends up actually undercutting the purpose of Jesus' life and ministry and death and resurrection.

But the picture is very different if we think of ourselves as "partners of Christ." By the indwelling of the Holy Spirit we actually and actively take part in the work of Christ, we are empowered and enabled to do as Jesus does and love as Jesus loves and live as Jesus lives. Provided that we do not harden our hearts, provided that we open ourselves to the deep and uncompromising love Jesus reveals, then by participating in that love we also become workers of divine works.

How will you be a partner of Christ in what you do today?

Monday in the First Week of Lent

"Do not say to yourself, 'My power and the might of my own hand have gained me this wealth.' But remember the Lord your God, for it is he who gives you power to get wealth." (Deuteronomy 8:17-18)

This passage for today intrigues me because it doesn't speak just about wealth, stuff, money, possessions -- but it speaks of the power to get wealth. It is not just about the material objects, but about the activity that produces the material objects. The things we count as valuable don't just have their value in a vacuum: they have value because we assign meaning to them, or we put effort into them, or we recognize that they are useful for meeting needs and sustaining life. A dollar bill is just a slip of paper; but it is invested with a powerful instrumental symbolism for conducting transactions in our economic system, so we count it as wealth -- or a little bit of wealth, at least. We can get so caught up in the attaining, trading, keeping, and increasing of our objects of wealth that we forget these objects have value in the first place because of a psychosociospiritual act that creates their value. And that spiritual act is rooted in God: it is God the Creator who creates us as creative beings, who in our turn can create meaning and value in the things of our material culture. Creating value is something God does first, and then God does in us, so that we can do it with things. Deuteronomy warns us that we forget that at our peril.  A Lenten discipline of simplicity and self-denial can help us refocus our attention less on the things themselves and more on the spiritual act of creativity, grounded in God, that is the source of value.

First Saturday in Lent

"Philip found Nathanael and said to him, 'We have found him about whom Moses in the law and also the prophets wrote, Jesus son of Joseph from Nazareth.' Nathanael said to him, 'Can anything good come out of Nazareth?' Philip said to him, 'Come and see.'" (John 1:45-46)


When Nathanael questioned Philip's religious belief and commitment, Philip did not argue or explain or attempt to persuade him. He just invited him to come and try for himself the experience that meant something to Philip. Too much time and energy is spent these days, I think, arguing and explaining and persuading about Christianity, when what matters is the quality of the experience. Churches and creeds and ceremonies are intended to help us to love God and to love our neighbors -- that's it. Because our notion of "love" is often superficial, and because we are often overly selective about who we will consider a "neighbor," and because we can adopt some very silly notions about God, it is often the role of churches and creeds and ceremonies to call us out of ourselves, to set goals before us that are greater than those we'd choose for ourselves -- and that can often be less than comfortable. So the Christian experience can be demanding, and sometimes that comes off to people as being authoritarian or guilt-inducing or controlling, especially to people who do not "come and see," who do not enter into the experience but only observe it from the outside. And sometimes churches and creeds and ceremonies forget their own central purpose of love, and become actually controlling and repressive, and then they need to be reformed. But things like the fasting and self-denial and discipline of Lent, which can look so negative from the outside, are at root only about learning to love, clearing away the distractions so that we can love God and love our neighbors more genuinely. And that is something best understood by experience, not by arguing or explaining or persuading. That's why the great invitation of Lent is to "come and see."

First Friday in Lent

Andrew son of John was a disciple of John the Baptist. One day Andrew was standing near John when Jesus walked by, and John said "There is the Lamb of God." Andrew and another disciple went after Jesus; and when Jesus saw them he turned and said "What are you looking for?" (John 1:35-38). That is the question, isn't it? What are we looking for? What do we want? What ambitions drive us, what fears do we want to avoid, what imaginations shape us, what aspirations lift us higher than we thought we were capable of? What are we looking for? The purpose of fasting and self-denial in Lent is to set aside some of the things with which we habitually satisfy our desires, so that the desires themselves can come more clearly into view, so that we know more consciously what it is that we want. Fasting and self-denial is a way to hear Jesus ask us "What are you looking for?" If we take that question seriously, we may be better able to tell if what we are looking for in life is also what God is looking for in us.

First Thursday of Lent

Titus 1:15, "To the pure all things are pure, but to the corrupt and unbelieving nothing is pure." Through Lenten discipline we work to purify our own hearts, to let go of addictions and illusions and compulsions, to see ourselves as we are and as we are in God. The more we can see ourselves in truth, the more we can see the things around us in truth, the more we see things as they are and not just as our desires color them. Then we see all things as pure -- neither temptations nor threats nor fears -- but facts to be engaged as we do the work God gives us to do.

Ash Wednesday

Isaiah 57:16, "I will not continually accuse, nor will I always be angry; for then the spirits would grow faint before me, even the souls that I have made." Remember that the purpose of Lent is not to feel bad about ourselves or our sins, but to come closer to the God who does not want our spirits to grow faint.

Home. Again.

A journey isn't really over until you're home again. And if you've taken a real journey, "home" isn't the same as when you left it, because you aren't the same as when you left. The final step of a true journey is not just getting home but being home, the step of integrating what you've experienced with where you live day-by-day.

So what's the final step of this journey?

Before I left, I said that I wanted to make this trip about being at prayer. I failed. That's not to say I didn't pray -- I said plenty of prayers, aloud when asked, silently when not. But I'd written before we left about prayer being a disposition of the soul, an opening of the spirit to a sacramental, "binocular" vision of outward and visible things radiant with inward and spiritual lights. I'd wanted to dispose myself to such prayer as much as I could on this trip. I couldn't do it -- or at least I couldn't do it as consistently as I had hoped. Sometimes the shovelful of dirt was just a shovelful of dirt, not a finite echo of the infinite creating Word; sometimes the good meal was just body fuel, not a gift of God; sometimes the work team was just a bunch of gabby, crabby people, not a gracefully functioning limb of the Body of Christ. There were sacramental moments, to be sure: listening to Oakley and Olman conversing in Spanish as we drove to Agua Caliente, not understanding a word they said (well, maybe one or two words) but hearing so very clearly the friendship and affection and genuine joy that passed between them; watching a large rock crack under my iron bar and having the sudden feeling that I could see the whole crystal geometry of the stone revealed in a single moment; even the feeling of some genuine hunger, some real appetite, after having been sick, and recognizing it as a touch of healing grace. The trip was not without its epiphanies. But they were fewer than I'd hoped for, my vision was more occluded than I'd imagined, my soul was not so well disposed as I'd intended.

I suppose that should be no surprise. Sacramental awareness is something saints strive for years to awaken. Like Zen mindfulness or yoga suppleness, sacramental awareness is the fruit of long and regular practice; it can't just be turned on and off like a switch. And even with years of practice, as I've had in the church, sacramental awareness must still be cultivated, awakened, invited, as a matter of intention -- it's not just automatic, like a reflex, but is something to which the mind and soul and spirit must be intentionally attuned. And that attunement happens more readily -- not automatically, but more readily -- when you take time for the practices that cultivate it.

For me, one of those practices is taking time alone with my thoughts. I am very introverted, as psychologists measure these things, and I know that if I don't get a certain amount of alone-time each day I begin to get twitchy. Alone-time is not easy to find on a worksite or a bus or a double-occupancy hotel room (even when the other occupant is one's own best beloved), and when the wee hours of morning and nighttime are blanked out by exhaustion. Without quiet time just to attend to the texture of my experience, that experience tends to get away from me, I tend to become too submerged in the rapid flux of feeling, and flashes of impatience, interest, irritation, humor, annoyance, wonder, fatigue, tend to drive me more than me integrating them. I'm sure there were times on this trip when the other mission trippers felt I was being antisocial or distant or just plain ornery, when really all I was was doing was trying to get a little quiet in my soul. And for me, getting submerged in the flux of feeling is a sure way to lose sight of the sacramental dimension of things: the inward and spiritual grace can only shine through if the mind and will and appetites are not too consumed by and attached to the outward and visible things. I am reminded (again, always again) that part of my prayer practice must always be getting time alone just to rise up a bit from the flux of experience and attend to it as it flows by.

And when I can, as it were, sit on the riverbank like Hesse's Siddhartha and observe my experience flow by, something else reveals itself as well. It's that even though the surface features of experience may be jangling or discordant or mismatched -- even painful -- down deeper there is a steadiness, a coordination, a harmony, that comprehends the elements and guides them toward some wholeness. Gerard Manley Hopkins writes in "God's Grandeur" -- that sacramental sonnet par excellence -- "there is the dearest freshness deep down things"; Alfred North Whitehead speaks of religion originating in the experience of "a character of permanent rightness inherent in the nature of things"; even Hamlet says "There is a power that shapes our ends, rough-hew them how we will." I believe that to be true, and I believe that to be God. Process theology teaches that every moment of reality begins and ends with God: God initiates each moment with an aim, a hope, a call, for what that moment can become; and when each moment becomes all it can and experiences itself in full, that fullness passes back into God as an element in God's ongoing and everlasting experience of the world. From this experience of the world-as-it-is, God shapes new aims and hopes and calls for the next generation of moments for the world-as-it-can-be. In this way the moments of the world and the outpouring of God are in a kind of constant dialogue, a perpetual exchange that constitutes Creation. It's all very cosmological; but it's very personal as well. The moments of my experience, disjointed as I might find them, form a thread -- a tiny thread perhaps, but a constitutive thread nonetheless -- in God's experience of the world. God is constantly looking at the world through my eyes, feeling the world through my feelings -- and everybody and everything else's too -- and pulling it all together into one whole harmonious reality. God makes me a partner in Creation, whether I know it or not; but I can be a much better partner when I know it, when I pay attention to the quality of the thoughts and feelings and experiences that flow through me, when I am aware of the ongoing dialogue of aims and fulfillments God is having with me, and when I intentionally do what I can to hold up my part of the conversation. Some of my most vivid prayer experiences have come under the image, not of me facing God and speaking, but of me beside God, both of us looking at the outward and visible things of the world, people and oceans and rocks and churches and mountains, and God guiding me to see and respond to the inward and spiritual grace. We sometimes describe Christian service as being God's hands and feet for acting in the world; we might equally well describe Christian prayer as being God's eyes and ears for feeling the world. That is also what it means to be God's witnesses. We can either grieve or delight the Holy Spirit of God with the quality of experience we pass on; we can be inspired and empowered by the experience of God within, shaping the thread of our moments toward compassion and love and beauty and peace and right relationship. That is, for me, the essence of prayer.

And that was the focus I could not consistently maintain on this trip. I suppose it shouldn't surprise me. As T.S. Eliot said, "human kind cannot bear very much reality." And I can hardly be surprised that depth of experience doesn't come when I don't do the things that allow my experience to go deep. But God works in us for compassion and justice and peace, even when we're not aware of it; and we are carried on the prayers of others, even when our own prayers aren't as consistent as we'd like them to be. God was at work on this trip, in breaking rock to build a church, in bearing witness to the contrasts between beauty and poverty and strength and weakness, in doing manual labor that the local folks could have done faster and better but couldn't do because they had jobs and lives and survival of their own to attend to, in celebrating Eucharist in a half-finished church. God was there, in my hands and eyes and heart, and in everyone else's too -- and now that we're home, God is inviting me to learn from this trip how to be more attentive to God's calling, rejoicing, always-already-there presence. God is, again, calling me to pray.