The last few days have been traveling days for me. After church on Sunday we set out for a week of vacation with my family in southern Ohio. Often this is a flying trip but this time we did the road trip through the farmlands of Wisconsin, across the flatter lands of Illinois and Indiana and then into the rolling hills of Ohio. This trip is one I have taken many times. There are familiar spots along the way, markers that we are half way there or nearly there. Some of the markers have been shined up and look better than I remember while others have grown shabby over the years. There is a sadness to see them diminished.

Driving across this land in March, these fields that are home to the ‘bread basket’ of our country, look much different than they will in just a few months. For as far as the eye could see, fertile soil rolled out mile after mile in its waiting time. Waiting for warmer weather. Waiting for tilling. Waiting for planting. Waiting to come into its fullness. Rich dirt,turned over so its black color shone was, like the human who observed it, waiting for the season of spring to unfold. This   view of the waiting fields was only interrupted by a single white farmhouse plunked in the middle, home to the farmers who were likely also in the same suspension of season. Looming over it all were the enormous wind turbines gently fanning their angel wings over the waiting game. Something about these tall, white pinwheels always pulls at my heart…..their power to harness the wind and create unseen, yet experienced energy. Seeing their slow turning always expands my heart in my chest. 

Waiting is something that is difficult for most of us. Our impatience almost always gets the best of us. And yet the opportunity to observe these fields in their waiting stages brought about a certain patient pull in me. To look out over their expanse and to know that, soon, they will be giving birth to life that will then feed the lives of thousands can instill a patient hope for what is yet to be. I wonder if the farmer feels the same. I wonder if those who make their homes in the houses dwarfed by land yet unyielding look out over the black soil and experience that patient hope. Of possibility. Of promise.

No matter our work, no matter the landscape that greets our eyes each morning, we have a fickle relationship with waiting and patience. These days of Lent can be an invitation to be, simply be, in this particular day of this forty day journey. Not yesterday. Not tomorrow. Not the ritual of Ash Wednesday….not yet the alleluia of Easter. The fields of Lent still stretch before us and though we may have planted some seeds within the soil, patient waiting is still required. 

Lent, which comes from an old English word meaning spring, holds the promise of new life. But it is a new life that does not come with the fast paced, do-it-now, immediate pace to which we are accustomed. Instead, it is the ‘slow work of God’ with which our faith community has been reflecting over these last weeks. Slow work that thaws frozen ground. Slow work that allows planting small seeds and trusting in the movement of Sun and rain to pull and water them. Slow work that begs the humans observing to breathe more deeply, to keep an eye on what might happen when control is turned over to the Mystery. 

And perhaps, this is the greatest lesson of all in this long, waiting season.

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We are people of story. We were made for story, made of story and it is story that helps us survive and evolve. To tell the important stories that have shaped us and to do so in new ways is the gift of imagination and creativity. But it also the stuff that saves us and breathes new life into us.

Personally, I have always been someone who loves to see a Shakespeare play ‘updated’, told with props, scenery and nuance that brings another dimension to a classic tale. While Elizabethan clothing is beautiful and I love looking at it, there is something to be said for hearing the verse of this great playwright spoken by people wearing clothes that are familiar, in scenery I may have experienced. Though, of course, I cannot know it to be true, I somehow like to believe that Shakespeare would also like to see these flights of his imagination brought to life in settings he could not have imagined, allowing him to see the timelessness of the stories he wrote.

Yesterday I attended a production of ‘Jesus Christ Superstar’ at Lake Harriet United Methodist Church in south a Minneapolis. This 1970 rock opera by Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice was a hit in its time and also one that was shunned as heretical by some. It was the stuff of my youth and I even had the gift of being in a production in college. It was fun to experience how the lyrics, the pauses, the phrasing, the music came flowing back and washing through me as if it had never left. Good stories do that. As the musical tries to answer many of the questions people have had over time about Judas and Jesus, their relationship, the balance of power and justice, Jesus’ own understanding of his life and role in what is the central faith story for the Christian household, it was a massive undertaking by two artists. The fact that this particular rendition of its telling has not been left to some forgotten shelf, to another time of rock opera mania, is fascinating.

And yet it is a story that can be…..actually must be…picked up from its 1970’s home and placed in a new time. This production used a homeless shelter to house its characters. Jesus, Judas, the apostles, Mary Magdalene, all were found in a shelter for the least among us. They were fed at a soup line and surrounded by the various, colorful characters that can be seen at any shelter, in any city, all across the country. Pilate, Herod and those in power looked like those many of us sit next to at desks and see moving along the avenues of business and government. Business suits, red power ties, cellphones close at hand, checking all the important information flowing to us at all times. It was powerful imagery and good theater. The fact that it was created by a church community, with people of all ages, made it even more so.

So much of the time we like to keep our faith stories where they were….written two thousand years ago or more. We like to do the work of studying historical context and unpacking language interpretation to better understand what the writers of the stories really intended. This is important work to do but it can also allow us to stay in our head, to think that this faith thing is a purely intellectual exercise. But the real test of a story and of faith is to bring the intention and power of that story off the page and into our living, to let it into our heart. That’s what this production did for me…..a show that in the time it was written, was likely thought might become just a campy musical created by people who wanted to have guitars in church, to distance themselves from the hymns of their parents and grandparents. To see the story we have all been walking through once again in this Lent brought to life by regular people, re-imagining it for our time, placing it at the intersection of one of our biggest challenges we know as a nation and a faith tradition…..homelessness….was brilliant and prophetic. To them all, I say ‘Bravo!’

I say ‘bravo’ and thank you. Thank you for reminding me of the power of story and that these stories we tell are ones that are ‘living’ if we allow them. In that living we we can come to know in new ways their transformational power which is the point, isn’t it?

This production is running one more weekend. If you are reading this in the Twin Cities, I commend it to. You will not be disappointed.

“What you hold, may you always hold.
What you do, may you always do.
And never abandon, never abandon.”
~St. Clare of Assisii

There are words that seem to draw us back to them. You can be walking along, minding your own business, and a phrase or word will play itself across the screen of your mind or whisper into you ear. Who knows why this happens? Sometimes these are not welcome words. Sometimes they are old, poor messages given us in other days that are not helpful, even painful. Words a parent or teacher or supposed friend said that sought to define who they thought we were but were not true at all. These are the phrases that can show up that to try to pull us from a new found path or some well worn practice toward healing and wholeness. These are not the phrases I am thinking of today.

Instead, I am remembering words that can be touchstones, reminders of the truly, deep wisdom that we all have but often forget. Things we know about ourselves….how we tick, what ways of communicating make sense and what ways will never work for us. Things we have come to believe in down to our marrow. What we would ‘go to battle for’ and what we are willing to let go. Sometimes these reminders are snippets of conversations that seemed benign at the time but on later reflection we knew to be pivotal in our shaping. Again….a parent, a teacher, a friend could have spoken them or sometimes it is a favored author whose well chosen words were the ones to hold this weight, this power.

Periodically, I come back to the words of St. Clare of Assisi which appear above. These words came to me later in my life by way of a short sung refrain. I remember where I was and the sights and sounds and feel of the room. I was swept up and held by the powerful intention of her words. From that moment on Clare’s words have become a sort of affirmation of faith for me. They seemed to speak of that knowing that we often feel just at the center of our body, our gut, but the place that represents something more. In chakra language it is the solar plexus, the place of our life force.

This past weekend we sang this refrain again at a women’s retreat. We did so while honoring the women in our lives who have nurtured our roots and grounded us, those that have helped us stand strong and those who have helped us reach up and out into the world. Clare’s words seemed the perfect soundtrack for what we were doing, what we were claiming.

In our lives situations happen that can draw us away from what we know, what we hold. People can come into our lives that can try to distort our own deep knowing. It can be a mind altering and heart-breaking experience. Life circumstances…..illness, loss, grief, injury, abuse, addiction…..can also mess with what we hold most dear and knock us, temporarily, off center. Right now, I am thinking of the many people who have recently lost jobs in our community due to corporate change. I am also thinking of a dear one who is fighting for his life in a hospital across the river. May they all find some way to hear the phrase, the sacred word that brings them to their own deep and grounded knowing of what they hold, what they will never abandon. And may it lead them to their own experience of how they are held and never abandoned by the One who walks with them.

There is courage and power in Clare’s words and they can draw you into a confidence and certainty that can serve you well. I know they have for me. In October I was blessed to be in a church in Italy dedicated to Clare’s work, her life. Standing before a wax figure depicting her that lay on top of her tomb, time stood still for me, an odd thing for this Methodist gal. And yet it was true. I was suspended in some liminal space and time. Perhaps her words were once again affirming themselves in me. Whatever happened it was a moment I will never forget. I felt it in my solar plexus…..my life force.

“What you hold may you always hold.
What you do, may you always do and never abandon.
But with swift pace, light step and unswerving feet,
so that even your steps stir up no dust,
Go forward, the spirit of our God has called you.”

These are the days to be vigilant. To keep our eyes and ears and all our senses open to the change that is slowly arriving. There is a palpable shift in the air around us. If you breath deeply as you make your first morning step into the outside world, you can smell something happening. It is the scent of ‘what next’. Full of wetness and earthiness and hope, its scent lingers in your nostrils. The scent is accompanied by a different slant of light. The Sun seems closer, more vibrant, as if it has tremendous work to do….which it does. While we humans may have messed with our created timepieces and moved an hour ahead over the weekend, the Sun is doing its work without need of anyone naming its light, its intensity, its beauty. It is simply doing what it has always done and will continue to do. For those of us with sensitive skin, it is time to ramp up on the sunscreen usage!

Yesterday morning as I sat in the semi-darkness of early morning, I was startled by the loud, honk of returning. Two large geese flew right over our house, low enough for me to catch a good look at their improbable, flying bodies. Their honking greeting seemed to say: ” Hello! We’re back! Did you miss us?” And then later in the morning, I was walking out of the church and coming in the door was one of our dear ones who also flies to warmer climes in the winter. We greeted one another with hugs and laughter saying….”It must be spring!” It was good to see both human and bird for seeing them signaled a change that is coming.

As winters go this one has not been bad. There have been cold days, yes, but we have not seen the snow we so often do. That precipitation has made its way to other parts of the country this year. But winter has a way of running its course and the inevitable turn toward spring is always welcome regardless of the severity of winter. It is a guest whose face we never tire of seeing at our door.

There is a grace that lives in spring that calls to some of the deepest parts of us. It is the new life that we thought was perhaps impossible. Because, if we are honest, it is the cold and frozen places in our lives that we think might never change, might never warm to something different. In truth sometimes we want to hold onto those frozen places, keep the cold, hard thoughts, feelings, opinions, beliefs, just as they have always been. It is easier that way. After all change is difficult, growing is often painful, and courage can be in short supply. To remain in the wintry places only requires putting on a few more layers of protection and nothing ever need change.

But there is a seed that was planted within us by the One who breathed us into being. It is a seed that has provided for the grace of all that would call us to our fullness.. And this requires the painful and beautiful work of letting go, of reaching up, of melting, of changing,of growing. While we often forget this seed, it becomes visible to us in the change of seasons, in the movement from winter to spring. It does not happen over night. It happens slowly, with metered intention. It may arrive in the semi-darkness but longs to live fully in the brightness of daylight.

These are the days to be vigilant in our watching,in our acts of being awake to the slow work of God in our midst. Piles of dirty snow are melting back into the Earth. Green is emerging from white. Buds are itching to burst open. There is returning all around. Within it all there is an eternal message that calls out to us asking us to take stock of those places within that are begging for the warmth of the Sun, those places that are hoping for the grace of change.

On this emerging day, may we have the capacity to see and hear and taste and smell and feel the gifts of all that is arriving.

“Winter is such a good time to read.” This remark was made in a group I was in this past week. And it is true. These cold days that have surrounded most of the country are perfect for curling up with a good book. Whether it is fiction or nonfiction, these days seem to say it is ok to rest and warm up with the diversion of a good book. The fact is that, for me, all seasons are good times for reading but winter has its own joyful rhythm for reading. I have noticed that I have moved from book to book these last weeks without taking a breath in between. And while some of that reading has to do with my work, the majority of it is completely for entertainment. The longer the cold temperatures linger, the more I want to devour books.

A couple of weeks ago I was driving through the Highland Park neighborhood and noticed a large truck ahead of me. It was painted colorfully. It had pulled out of the parking lot that led to several apartment buildings. As I came closer to the truck I saw fanciful characters painted all around the truck. It was a Bookmobile! I had no idea these even still existed especially not in the city. But there it was fresh from delivering books to an apartment complex, or so it seemed. I wondered at why this would be so when a library was just blocks away. Perhaps it was a gift of winter for those who find it more difficult to get out when we are surrounded by snow and ice.

As a child I visited the library weekly if not more often. Summers were spent in the cool, air conditioned space breathing in the smells of musty paper and ink. As a teenager, after school hours were often spent at the long library table in the room filled with reference books. Looking back I think I was ‘playing at college’, anxious to be done with the trials and trivialities of high school and on to what I dreamed would be bigger things. When our sons were younger a weekly visit to the library lasted well through elementary school. And one of my deep joys is to have conversations with our English major son about the most recent book he has read.

We are people bound together by words. From the moment that first word formed from a grunt on the lips of our ancient ancestors, we have been held by these creations of our imagination and necessity. Words help us tell the story of who we are, where we have been, what we hope for, what we fear. Words can help us be understood and also serve to confuse our deepest intentions. Words can hurt or heal. Words can unite or divide. And words can be strung together to create beauty and humor and inspiration and wisdom that bring us life.

On Sunday during worship, one of our dear ones was sharing her experience of how she had been witness to the ‘slow work of God’, our Lenten theme. While sharing she mentioned the scripture verse that had been ‘her confirmation verse.’ This was a foreign concept to me and after worship I asked her about it. Soon someone shared their ‘confirmation verse.’ Apparently it had been, perhaps still is, a practice to assign confirmation students a particular verse from scripture that is ‘theirs’. I imagine a confirmation leader or mentor reflecting on scripture and deciding on the perfect one for each student….words that will travel through life with a person…..as these scripture verses certainly have for those who shared them with me.

I wondered at what words are ‘my confirmation words’……words that have traveled with me, challenged me, buoyed me, held me. What are yours? I have wondered what stories have done the same, stories from both sacred and popular texts, that have served to lift me up and cause me to continue on the path with confidence or fortitude. These words of inspiration need not always be ones from great writers but are often the simple gift of imagination by authors whose only intention was to offer a diversion on a cold, winter’s day or respite in the heat of summer. And yet something in the words they chose to string together has helped us or healed us.

On this day, this frigid time before the world turns its face toward spring, what are the books that have brought you back to life? What are the phrases that you have repeated over and over in the darkest night? What words are your ‘confirmation’ good news?

Whatever the stories, the phrases or the single word, hold them close today. Words matter.

There comes a time in winter when the need to see green things and color cannot be denied. The white and gray of winter days, no matter how beautiful in its own right, can become mind and spirit numbing as well as flesh freezing. Though the actual temperatures can get to us and cause us to want to hibernate, I think it might be the monotony of a colorless view of life around us that can send us screaming to places south if we are privileged to do so or at least to the florist’s for a bit of relief. We have reached, I believe, that time in winter.

Over the last few weeks I have purchased, first one and then a second, bulb garden. These little pots of green that promise so much more are some of the best medicine for the winter doldrums. With a little bit of water and any sunlight that can be found, they provide a daily dose of hope and green and, eventually, color. To watch their daily progress is like watching a baby roll over, finds its way to crawling, then to pulling itself up and finally taking a first step. With each move along the path I want to clap my hands together with praise and affirmation:”Good job! Good job!”

This is where we are. And like the landscape around us most of us are also very tired of the layers of clothes we have been putting on for months. Tired of their blacks and grays and browns. I told a friend that what I really want is a school uniform so I do not have to think about what combination of drab, winter clothes I will throw on. Again, a thought of pure privilege and I know it is so and yet I confess to thinking it. It is fairly easy to take the words of the scriptures to heart…..do not worry about what you will wear….because….I am considering the lilies and waiting for their arrival.

Sometimes our deep desire for color and green finds an extension in giving that gift to others which is what happened to me this past Sunday. I came into my office after worship and found a tall, white garbage bag on my desk. Nestled inside was a large pot of unbloomed daffodils someone had forced through the winter. A gift of green with the hope of color. This pot sits now waiting to surprise me with its next steps. Though the gift-giver left no message, I think I know who who the anonymous giver is. Someone of like-minded need.

One of the gifts of Lent is that it comes to those of us in the northern climes in these days of winter when we are longing….longing…for newness, for what might be. We are able to take the daily steps toward something that is not yet visible to us. “Above all, trust in the slow work of God” ……says Pierre Teilard de Chardin, SJ. This is what we are doing in these long, cold and often dark days of Lent. We are trusting that some new brightness will come into our lives and show us, once again, the possibility of it all. It is slow work and often invisible work and yet it is happening none-the-less.

But, like the act of placing a bulb garden in our midst, sometimes we need to create touchstones that allow us to walk with intention in this slow work. The clothes we wear for this work is patience, something I find personally challenging. Do you? Somehow the visual of the bulb garden is a good reminder that rarely does something of beauty and worth happen quickly, overnight. It takes time and blessed waiting and watching.

As we continue into the heart of Lent, my prayer is that this slow work will have its way with me and I will come to the celebration of Easter with a quieter, calmer heart for the possibilities placed before us with each new day. This walk toward rebirth can be a dark and colorless path. But the rewards are priceless and beautiful. The bulb garden is teaching me that.

A few weeks ago at a retreat I was a part of, we were making our way around the circle saying our names. I am not sure how it happened, if it was seem thing I or someone else said, but people began to give not only their first but their middle names as well. Most people knew one another before this retreat but it was interesting how, when folks used both first and second names, the circle seemed fresh, new, and people seemed to be meeting one another in a different way. Questions flew about the room as to how middle names were chosen, what the stories were that were part of that name. Something in that gathering of people was changed, was opened up by hearing aloud a fuller name for people they had known for some time. It was a fascinating and powerful experience.

Yesterday I was speaking on the phone to our older Seattle son who is a preschool teacher. It is one of my great joys to hear him talk of the children who come into his life. He becomes animated and his voice fills with joy as he tells funny and sweet stories of these little one. He was telling me about a new student, a little three year old girl whose family does not speak English at home. This little one is now maneuvering her way in a world of other children, playing, and learning English as she goes. She also is not called by her given name at home but by special pet names we all use in families. Each family has its own way of doing this…Buddy, Sweety, Kiddo….you know what I mean. And because of this the girl did not really answer or turn in recognition to the teacher’s calling out her name in the group. “We are helping her learn her name.”, my son said.

His words went deep into me. What an amazing gift to give to another person… to help them learn their name. Many times we call ourselves names that are not our real name. I have known those who call themselves ‘stupid’ or ‘irresponsible’ or ‘loser’ or even worse ‘worthless’. Sometimes these are names given to people at an early age and it takes that person a lifetime to be taught their real name. In the meantime, the damage of that false name can harm them and those around them with its lies. The pain of not answering to your real name can have lasting scars.

This past Sunday in the Christian household we began the long journey of Lent together. The scripture we heard was of Jesus rising out of the waters of baptism and hearing God’s voice name him…..Beloved. It was a name that blessed him and went with him into the wilderness where he would need to cling to both the blessing and the name. This name…Beloved…is also given to each of us. As images of the One who breathed us into being, this name is part and parcel of that very Breath. We carry it with us even when we can’t remember it, even when others may call us otherwise.

Like the little girl in my son’s class, most of us need to learn that name. It does not come easily to us. The world can see to that in a myriad of ways. But that does not make it untrue. Each of us is Beloved. Sometimes we simply need teachers who walk with us, stand beside us, read stories to us, take us to the playground, help us unwrap our sandwich at lunchtime, settle us down for an afternoon nap. Those who by their actions and words remind us of our name. Beloved.

Who has helped you learn your name? Who in your life continues to look at you and help you remember that your are, indeed, Beloved? How will you be that teacher, that companion that helps another learn their name?

The fullness of our names is important. To speak our names and to claim those names helps to change the energy in a room and the power in the world. May we carry with grace all our names…..especially Beloved….into the days ahead. There just might be wilderness places in which we will need to cling to those names and remember who we truly are.

The art and words of artist Jan Richardson have been an inspiration to me for years. I can’t remember when I first learned of her work but I heard her speak years ago and have been taken by her gentle way of embracing the presence of the Divine in her life and then offering that to others through collage, painting and poetry. This Lent I am once again participating in an online retreat that she hosts. Five mornings a week a painting, a reflection and a poem usually in the form of a blessing arrives in my email inbox. This gift shows up sometime in the wee hours of the morning and it is the first contact with words I have in the day.

This second week of Lent she is focusing on the word ‘memory.’ She points out the number of times the scriptures use the word ‘remembrance’ and most of those places are very significant in the shaping of the stories that hold the Christian and Jewish households. Remembrance is how we tell our own stories, the ones that gave birth to us, that help us hold onto the wisdom we learned from mistakes and missteps, those experiences that filled us with deep joy and awe that sometimes connected us with Mystery. We remember so we can pass on to friends, family, another generation, what it was like to be ‘us’ in the span of years with which we have been blessed.

Of course, memory is a tricky thing. Anyone who is a sibling and begins to tell a story of something that happened, something seemingly significant or trivial, at a family gathering often hears a brother or sister recount the story in a very different manner. What is remembered from the original experience is different depending on the person. The lens we use is uniquely ours and how we experience and then remember is also. It is an important lesson to learn in any setting. It can keep us humble.

There are memories that we cherish. The birth of a child. The first time we laid eyes on a beloved. A special trip to someplace we had always longed to go. A meal so delicious that even in the memory it is nearly possible to taste it again. Sites of beauty and awe. An encounter with a creature that filled us with deep knowing we are a part of something immense.

There are also memories we would just as soon forget. The death of a loved one. A diagnosis that shattered us. An accident that changed everything. The loss of a job, a hope, a dream. Harms that we met and hurts whose wounds we still wear. These are memories we often wish there was a delete button for.

How we cherish our memories is up to us. And how we allow them to be remembrances that are healthy and helpful in living this day and into the future can make all the difference. There are people I know whose attachment to memory is so strong that it is difficult to move into the future. This is also true with communities. Sometimes the memory of what has been will not let the possibility of what might be evolve. Memory can become a prison or a bridge or what helps us take flight.

Most children I know love to hear the story of how they were born. I remember sitting with our sons flipping through their ‘baby book’ looking at the pictures of their early days. This looking was usually accompanied by telling once again how the day of their birth played out, who came to visit, what sounds they made, how their name was chosen. It seemed to be a kind of anchor in remembering who they were as they were living into they would become. Each of us have a similar anchoring moment or moments. What are yours? What are the memories that ground you and remind you of what is most important in your life? What lens do you wear when you remember?

The season of Lent is grounded in memory. We are telling an ancient story and mining its words for what it brings to us this go round the Sun. The story is remembered by each of us in different ways as all stories are. It is up to each of us how we re-member. May there be gentleness and grace in all our memories and may they help us be present to the wisdom of what has gone before.

Yesterday two unrelated experiences came together to cause me to ponder all the ways in which we can believe our differences create impossible opportunities for coming together. So often it seems, as we listen to the radio or television or read the news, the ways in which we have named our different ways of seeing the world, of believing and worshiping, of understanding and using power, seems impossible to overcome. Backs are turned. Words are said that can’t be taken back. Wars are waged. Any notion of acting in unity seems beyond the realm of human imagination. We see it played out over and over on the large and small scales of human living. Just writing those words brings a certain sadness, I have to admit.

But yesterday at worship during prayers one from our circle shared his experience of watching his grandsons playing at an indoor playground. As they played, other children of different skin colors and even different languages came into the play area and seemingly without missing a best, all the children were playing together. Children can have a way of doing this. Whatever the game at hand, children can welcome another player to their mix. Running….jumping….throwing a ball….and almost always laughter. Sweet, child laughter.

Later in the day I received a photo by text from my husband who is traveling to places warmer than here. Places where grass is visible and water moves. There were no words to accompany the photo. I believe he knew I would get the message without any explanation. Sitting on some kind of nest or at least round pile of dirt and vegetation in the water sat an animal, woodchuck, muskrat?….two mallard ducks…..and a turtle. All within a few inches of one another. Co-existing in the sunshine and warmth. I laughed out loud and also felt warmth flow throughout my body. It seemed a continuation of the hope lifted in the prayer earlier in the morning.

So many times our only lens in life is the one of difference. We use to it to build walls and create definitions of class, status, politics, gender, religion, sexuality. There must be something in doing so that creates an illusion of control, of a certainty about order that helps us breathe easier and that calms our fears. But I wonder, does it serve us well? Does it hold the common good of all Creation? Does it bring us to a more evolved place of being the creatures we were created to be? My experience says not.

Yesterday afternoon, I gathered with a group of people to watch and discuss a DVD series called Painting the Stars that celebrates the communion of science and faith and looks at the ways in which the expression of faith in the Christian household has and is evolving. Taking into account what we have learned in the last 2000 years about how the universe works, the series asks how our faith has evolved. Do the ways of understanding the scriptures and the life of Jesus mean to us what they did to the early followers? How does what we know about the science of Creation impact our faith and our living? It was a fascinating conversation and seemed perfect to have at the end of the first week in Lent. After all, what is Lent but an opportunity to enter into this story again, mining the wilderness for ways of becoming the fullness of who God intended us to be?

Somehow the fullness of that eternal intention of unity with Creator and Creation came to me yesterday in a prayer and a picture. Someplace along his own wilderness journey, Job hears a voice saying: “But ask the animals, and they will teach you; the birds of the air, and they will tell you; ask the plants of the earth,and they will teach you.” In an evolving faith lessons come from a variety of sources. Sometimes it is sacred text or the well chosen words of a speaker of wisdom. But other times the lesson shows up in a prayer for a rainbow of children playing or an assortment of varied creatures on a mound of soil.

And so it is. Blessed be.

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.