Category: Lent

Lent is meant to be about love

Sr. Dorcee, belovedLeave a comment

Sarah Clarkson for the win every single time.

Lent is the season in which I rediscover love.

But when I first began to attempt the ‘practise’ of Lent, I mostly equated Lent with law. With repentance, yes, and under grace, I know. After all, Lent ends with Easter and a feast to mark salvation. But since discovering this season of the church, I’ve often seen ‘the penitential season’ as a time in which I made laws of discipline to express my true contrition, to prove to God that my sorrow over all the ways I sin and fail is real.

Lent dawned bright this year in England, bright as my good intentions. On the day when much of the church begins a season of repentance, the sun blinked and gleamed in a stark blue sky and birds whistled as if it were May and the daffodils in the vase on my desk finally bloomed.

But that evening, after a long day, after a service in which the ashes of repentance were crossed into my forehead and those of my children, I looked down the long trail of the coming days, and all I saw was grey. I was weary and afraid, doubtful that I could keep strict laws or great fasts. Part of me so yearned for spiritual renewal that I felt willing to attempt a great effort in order to gain a deeper sense of spiritual life. But my body, my heart felt too busy and sleep-deprived to keep up the strictures of dawn devotion or the renunciation of chocolate. (You know?)

You can read the rest here. 

“The Washing of His Feet”, Dean Cornwell

Beloved is where we begin

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This has to be one of my most favorite poems of Jan Richardson’s. We are always, always beloved to God.

Beloved Is Where We Begin

If you would enter
into the wilderness,
do not begin
without a blessing.

Do not leave
without hearing
who you are:
Beloved,
named by the One
who has traveled this path
before you.

Do not go
without letting it echo
in your ears,
and if you find
it is hard
to let it into your heart,
do not despair.
That is what
this journey is for.

I cannot promise
this blessing will free you
from danger,
from fear,
from hunger
or thirst,
from the scorching
of sun
or the fall
of the night.

But I can tell you
that on this path
there will be help.

I can tell you
that on this way
there will be rest.

I can tell you
that you will know
the strange graces
that come to our aid
only on a road
such as this,
that fly to meet us
bearing comfort
and strength,
that come alongside us
for no other cause
than to lean themselves
toward our ear
and with their
curious insistence
whisper our name:

Beloved.
Beloved.
Beloved.

—Jan Richardson
from Circle of Grace

It’s Lent, but I feel incapable of praying

Sr. Dorcee, beloved1 Comment

In her usual beautiful prose, Sarah Clarkson writes about her struggle, her incapacity to pray.

THE NIGHT BURNS BRIGHT and dark in my memory, a contrast of moods and scenes like a Caravaggio painting. The cathedral; bright, honeyed stone and gold instruments glinting on the altar. The kindness of my friend and his saving of an excellent seat for me as I skidded in, breathless, the sweet furor of bedtime rituals with my four children still an echo in my brain, a slight wildness in my eye. And the music, a many-layered brightness of harmony and word, hued like a crimson sunset to my synesthetic mind as a small choir sang a selection of ancient Orthodox chants and prayers.

I let myself breathe deeply as the music surged forward, let my eyes rove the warm, dappled space of the medieval church that summer night. But the longer I looked, the more darkness I saw. The shadows like dirty flocks of ravens in the high corners, the vivid stained glass windows I loved so well in the daytime obscured by night, the pain at the back of so many prayers I heard chanted, pleas for God to put an end to despair and death. And the darkness of my own weary heart when the concert had ended and I sat outdoors at a nearby pub and confessed to my long-time mentor and friend, a priest, that I found myself almost unable to pray.

You can read the rest here.

The Heart of Virtue

Sr. Dorcee, beloved4 Comments

I have been plagued by Jansenism most of my life, and Lent can be an especially difficult challenge in that regard. But over the past couple of years, God has been freeing me of this heresy by his sovereign intervention in my life and by writings like this by Joshua Elzner (building on my years of reading Thérèse). You can see that I have read and reread these pages a few times now. I share them with hope that your eyes may also be opened to the true heart of virtue.

When you feel that you are sinking

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Another poem from Malcolm Guite, speaking especially to those who feel like they are sinking.

The Christian Plummet

Down into the icy depths you plunge,
The cold dark undertow of your depression,
Even your memories of light made strange,
As you fall further from all comprehension.
You feel as though they’ve thrown you overboard,
Your fellow Christians on the sunlit deck,
A stone-cold Jonah on whom scorn is poured,
A sacrifice to save them from the wreck.

But someone has their hands on your long line,
You sound for them the depths they sail above,
One who takes Jonah as his only sign
Sinks lower still to hold you in his love,
And though, you cannot see, or speak, or breathe,
The everlasting arms are underneath.

Malcolm Guite

Refuge for my broken spirit.

Sr. Dorcee, beloved1 Comment

(Oops. I meant to schedule this for this coming Sunday, but made a mistake. I trust God will use it for you now.) This Sunday I offer you this bit of a longer poem by Gregory of Narek:

Refuge for my broken spirit lies in your
living incorruptible, constant hope,
that looking on me with mercy,
as one condemned to perdition,
when I present myself before your heavenly beneficence,
empty-handed and without gifts,
bringing with me the evidence of your untold glory,
I will remind you
who never shuts your eyes,
never ignores the sighs of grief,
that with your cross of light
you may lift away from me, I beg you, the peril that chokes me,
with your comforting care, the vacillating sadness,
with your crown of thorns, the germs of my sin,
with the lashes of the whip, the blows of death,
with the memory of the slap in the face, the neediness of my shame,
with the spitting of your enemies, my contemptible vileness,
with your sip of vinegar, the bitterness of my soul.

Gregory of Narek