Above all, trust in the slow work of God.
~Pierre Teilard de Chardin, SJ

And so another Lent begins. This is the day we in the Christian household have named Ash Wednesday. Today you will likely see people walking around with a smudge of black on their foreheads. It is a mark they have received at a worship service that begins this forty day journey. It depends on who you talk to what the journey means. People carry their own messages that were planted within them about the season’s gifts or challenges. Messages caught from something a Sunday School teacher or minister said, something a parent or other adult mentioned along the way. For some it is a season of giving up, letting go, austerity. For others it is a taking on, an addition of spiritual practices that define days in a different way than the ones that have come before. It all depends on the person…..the kind of longing that exists….the life that has already been lived….the one hoped for.

There is a blessing in having some kind of focus when you choose to pay attention to these human created seasons meant to connect us in deeper ways with the Sacred. This Lenten season the community of which I am blessed to be a part has chosen as its focus a poem by Pierre Teilard de Chardin, a Jesuit priest who was both theologian and paleontologist, scientist and person of faith. His words, ‘above all, trust in the slow work of God’, will hold us as we walk toward Easter Sunday when Lent will have its grand ending.

Slow work. It is a countercultural message in so many ways. As 21st century people we are not given to trusting in most anything slow. Impatience seems to be our daily food and we cringe at the idea of nearly anything that would contribute to slowing our pace, our expectations, our work, our lives. So many times during any day I find myself shifting to some anxiety about the need to get going, to rush toward completion of a project or a thought. Seldom do I question what the rush is all about.

And yet, if we have lived any number of years at all and have been awake to them, we know that it is the slow work that really matters, that really contributes to growth, beauty, depth, legacy. Consider the bulbs nestled beneath the frozen ground right now, those round nuggets hiding in the darkness waiting to bring forth the first shoots of green and color to a world too long shrouded in white and gray. Slow work. Or the yeast that rests in dough for hours, punched down only to rise again even fuller creating the perfect loaf of bread. Slow Work. And of course there is the infant discovering its tiny hands and feet, searching the faces of those around for signs of love, trust, encouragement, inspiration, on its way to becoming an adult. Slow work.

The season of Lent receives its name from an Old English word ‘lecten’ which literally means to lengthen….to lengthen the hours of light that lead to the season of spring. Which is the slow work of God to which we will all be present over the next 40 days. Those of us who find our home in places where frigid temperatures have frozen the ground and suspended any sense of life are longing in sometimes desperate ways for these lengthened days of more light. We are staking our lives on greenness and the hope it brings. We are desperate for new life.

And so today some of us will be marked by ashes that represent the grittiness of what it means to be human. We were born out of the earth, out of the Garden after all, and we will some day return there. As the ashes are placed on our heads it might be a good thing to remember the ways in which the slow work of God has been present to us, in us. In remembering, we might be called to breathe more deeply, more intentionally, slowing down our pace and allowing the impatience that might be bubbling just below the surface to dissipate. Perhaps that dark mark of ashes will help us find rest in the slow work of God.