The winter is yet with us: rain, darkness, wind and cold; and a spiritual winter is yet with us, driven by global conflicts, a surge of health concerns from when it really didn’t feel safe to be in a hospital or in a doctor’s office, and a strange time of grappling with how frightening the pandemic was; it is safe enough for us now to start to touch those unacknowledged feelings.
I think that for so many of us, there is an unacknowledged cry within us, that we find indirect ways of expressing: “Please prove to us that we are alive, because we’re not sure that we are.” I remarked to someone recently that I thought it would take us five years to reconcile the trauma of this time. The person I was talking to said, “I think it will take a generation.”
Which brings us to Lent. Lent is a curative because it helps us to confront and acknowledge the unacknowledged. It lets us encounter the divisions, the fears, the anger, and sadness, and to see the desperate behaviors and separations toward which these feelings can drive us; to see the longings for things to be as they were, and for things to be even better than they were, as we hope it will prove our life to us.
Life is found in God and God’s community and in one another. It is not found in the separations and the turning inward that fear and loss can cause among us. Let us be joined in God, in hope and in God’s love. Let Lent give us nearness, and join us in and warm us to the light of the Springtime to come.
Blessings,
CJ+