Meditation for the fith week of Lent

Offered by Carrie Allport

Resurrection from Rot

We claim to be a people of resurrection faith, but we avoid the inevitable prerequisite of new life: DEATH.

Death is a taboo subject in our WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic) culture, isn’t it? It consistently works against all we cling to in our desire to control outcomes and death is much to be avoided. Ignorance, avoidance, naïveté, or ambivalence won’t make death go away, though. Death is an intrinsic part of our lifecycle. If truth be told, any conversation about death is undoubtedly coded conversation about LIFE.

Deterioration, decline, and decay are all essential for the decomposition necessary for regeneration. We dismissively describe this reality as rot. Without rot, the elemental building blocks of life aren’t available for creation’s continued restoration. Just ask a gardener.

Resurrection – the resurgence of the Breath of G-d animating again our renewed community of creation – originates in rot. Rot is that inevitable breaking down of what no longer is to the fundamental ingredients of life. These essential elements conspire to revive as hopeful humus. Teeming with potential, humus is soil, unlike dirt, which is devoid of life. We are soil creatures (adamah) ourselves, soulful with the Breath of G-d. Any confidence we compose that death is not just dirt grittily germinates in the composted life and death of Jesus.

In preparation for Holy Week and the degrading route to the Resurrection of Christ, what’s calling to be composted in your life? What deaths might you need to grieve and mourn? What’s teeming with potential in the stench of rot within our WEIRD institutions or faith communities? How might the Holy One be asking you to be humus in your practice of spiritual companionship?

Meditation for the fith week of Lent

Offered by Nina Whitnah

Six days before the Passover Jesus came to Bethany, the home of Lazarus, whom he had raised from the dead. There they gave a dinner for him. Martha served, and Lazarus was one of those reclining with him. Mary took a pound of costly perfume made of pure nard, anointed Jesus’s feet, and wiped them with her hair. The house was filled with the fragrance of the perfume. (John 12: 2-3)

The season of Lent is an opportunity, one could even say a gift that enables us, to make space for inward reflection, for a time of self-examination. The strong words of the prayer for the fifth Sunday of Lent in the Book of Common Prayer are almost jarring: “….[Y]ou alone can bring into order the unruly will and affections of sinners: Give your people grace to love what you command and desire what you promise…”

What is it that—in the midst of these days of many challenges, or as this collect says, “the swift and varied changes of the world”—we truly long for? What is the orientation of our heart?  What is the inclination of our will? In the beautiful story of Mary breaking the jar of expensive ointment with which she anointed the feet of Jesus, we have a picture of extravagant love and sacrifice.

With the courage of honest self-reflection and a consideration of our own true longings, we can be prepared to ask for the grace to love extravagantly. And if we do so, how can that inform our capacity to offer that grace and extravagant love to those whom we are accompanying in our role as spiritual directors?

Meditation for the fourth week of Lent                  

Offered by Leslie Richard

Go forth into the world to serve God with gladness; be of good courage; hold fast to that which is good; render to no one evil for evil; strengthen the fainthearted; support the weak; help the afflicted; honor all people; love and serve God, rejoicing in the power of the Holy Spirit.

These are the final words spoken at our congregation’s Sunday liturgy each week during Lent.  It is an exhortation to people on the threshold between sacred mysteries witnessed in the holy sanctuary, and the infinite manifestation of the Spirit’s movement in the world around us.  What I love about it is how it cradles between “gladness” and “rejoicing,” the expectation of the Holy Spirit’s presence and power in the grit and sweat of very real human encounters in a world filled with struggle, inequity, and fear.  The Spirit of God moves through every realm, the sacred and the profane, and transforms everything the Spirit touches, inside and out.

1.  Where are the thresholds where you have found yourself standing?  What lies on either side of this place?  Which way are you faced?  Do you notice an invitation or an urge to face in a different direction?  What might this mean for you?

2.  Are there any places in your life or in the world, where you long for the Spirit of God to move, touch and transform?  Can this be cradled between “gladness” and “rejoicing,” or are there other words that would be more suitable here?

Spirit of the living God, fall afresh on me.  Break me, melt me, mold me, fill me. Spirit of the living God, fall afresh on me.  (Daniel Iverson)

Meditation for the third week of Lent

Offered by Carrie Allport

This Lent, in the Revised Common Lectionary, we honor St. Joseph this week and observe the Annunciation next week. Both of these remembrances serve as examples to us of Joseph and Mary’s faithfulness in word and in deed. They both believed the promises of G-d’s word and individually acted on those promises in deed before they had any tangible proof that G-d’s promises would in fact come to pass. They believed G-d, and like Abram before them, it is reckoned unto them as righteousness.

Mary and Joseph’s righteousness, individually and in partnership with each other, made room in their lives, and their household, for G-d’s promises to come to fruition. Their acts of emptying out their own human will to made room for the work of the Holy Spirit to fulfill the will of G-d is understood theologically by the Greek word kenosis. Kenosis, or the voluntary self-emptying out to make room for the Divine will, is what the Triune G-d does to make room for us to join in the Trinitarian dance, what G-d does to make room for Jesus’ humanity in the Incarnation, and is what Jesus does to make room for the Holy One to bring redemption to the world through the Resurrection of Christ. G-d models kenotic love first; Mary and Joseph responded in kind, just like Abram before them.

Following their kenotic example, in both word and deed, what emptying out can you do this season? Where can you empty out to make more room for the work of the Holy Spirit to fulfill the will of G-d in your life? In your spiritual direction relationships, how can you voluntarily empty yourself out to make room for the Divine will in the lives of your directees?

Meditation for the second week of Lent

offered by Nina Whitnah

Belonging

I sometimes feel as if I am back in the middle school years watching the athletic kids excel in “gym class” or wondering what it would be like to be in the “smart” group. Even all these years later, that longing to belong and be welcomed is very real. These words from Scripture in the Revised Common Lectionary for the second Sunday of Lent offer encouragement:

“Jerusalem, Jerusalem, the city that kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to it! How often have I desired to gather your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you were not willing!” Luke: 13:34

You are my help. Abandon me not, nor forsake me, O God of my rescue. Though my mother and father forsook me, the Lord would gather me in. (Robert Alter, The Book of Psalms, Psalm 27: 9-10)

Robert Alter beautifully describes the trustworthiness of God’s care in his note: “The extravagance of this declaration of trust in God…is breathtaking and perhaps even disturbing….We can imagine, the psalmist says, circumstances in which [parental] love might fail, but God will be both father and mother to [one] in the most dire straits.”

The Psalm, combined with the heart-wrenching lament of Jesus as he ponders the city of Jerusalem for its unwillingness to be gathered, can encourage us to receive God’s love and embrace, to recognize that we  do, in fact, have a place of belonging.

Questions to ponder:

What keeps me from turning toward God?

What would it look like to receive the grace of God’s loving embrace, and how would that be reflected in my practice of spiritual direction with others?

Meditation for the first week of Lent

offered by Leslie Richard

He who dwells in the shelter of the Most High, who abides in the shadow of the Almighty, will say to the Lord, “My refuge and my fortress; my God in whom I trust.”  For he will deliver you from the snare of the fowler and from the deadly pestilence; he will cover you with his pinions, and under his wings you will find refuge; his faithfulness is a shield and buckler.  You will not fear the terror of the night, nor the arrow that flies by day, nor the pestilence that stalks in darkness, nor the destruction that wastes at noonday.  (Psalm 91:1-6)

What image or phrase speaks most prominently to you in this reading?

What do you notice about what it stirs in you, or how it makes you feel?

Is there anything which might prevent you from declaring “my God in whom I trust?”

What do you need?  What would you like to say to God?

How do you want this scripture to live in you today?

Holy One, I am so small and You are so great.  Even in Your shadow I feel the comfort of Your presence, the strength of Your command, the depth of Your love.  Remove from me any impediment that would prevent me from leaning more deeply into Your embrace.  Fill me so full of joy at seeing You, that I can boldly stand in the face of whatever this world may bring and sing back to you my song of love.

Amen.