Another Ash Wednesday.
Another Lent. Another season in the liturgical year to contemplate “what
does it all mean” and “how do I live like it means anything at all?” No matter what Jesus’s followers thought he
was all about—and the Gospels record their opinions as all over the map—the
events of that fateful Passover had to have taken them by surprise. Whatever their expectations for the Jesus
movement, his execution for criminal sedition was a big game-changer. Who could have foreseen such an event?
(Arguably Jesus, but if so, he didn’t seem to go about making it very clear to
even his closest followers.) And having seen their leader die ignominiously,
what were they to make of it? In order
to go on with their own lives, how were they to integrate his death into their
own personal histories as a meaningful event?
Eventually, the various atonement doctrines, revisionist
messianic prophecies, and the deification of Jesus by the increasingly political
church provided catechistic answers to these hard questions. Ultimately, though, we each have to answer
that question of meaning for ourselves just as the original followers grappled
with it in the first century. Each of us
must find our own meaning in life regardless of what answers are served up to
us by church or culture.
Lent is a six-week period designed to reflect on what
meaning we will give our lives. Two years ago, I began The Chronicles as a
Lenten exercise, expecting 40-Days-to-a-Renewed-You. What I got was a continuing odyssey in
spiritual death and resurrection. I
thought that February of 2010 that I was nearly recovered from my then
two-and-a-half year struggle with dysautonomia/adrenal dysfunction. Little did I know I was only beginning a
whole new adventure in chronic disease and spiritual health! Like the first disciples, who could have
foreseen how often in the last two years I would beg that this cup should pass
from me, how many times I cried out from the depths of my soul for the God who
had forsaken me, how close I would come to sighing simply, “it is finished.”
This sojourn in my personal Abyss has been more malevolent
than I ever expected, the skeletons in my closet became demons that nearly
destroyed my soul. Not for lack of
willingness on my part did they fail; more times than I can count, I pleaded
just to die and to let the inner struggle cease. But God kept waking me up to one more dawn; weep
though I did at yet another day of hauling my weary, aching, broken self out of
bed. Grace is a terrible thing.
Lent has come around again. Why am I still here? What is my purpose in continuing to breathe,
to think, to move? In the last few weeks
I have been slowly resurrecting from the ashes of my old dead self, why do I
live? Grace transforms, whether we will
or no. What has grace wrought? Like those devastated survivors of that
crucial crucifixion, I look around me and begin to pick up the pieces of myself
that I find and discover that they fit together differently that before. I am not the same person who went into this
grave, who is this new person Grace has borne?
Jesus’s followers began their fateful journey, leaving every
part of the lives they knew in Galilee, traveling to another country for a
religious celebration, only to find that everything on which they had staked
they hopes and dreams was staked instead to a cross as a common criminal. Their
lives, their plans, lay destroyed at the foot of the cross that scattered them
to the winds. Grace transformed those
shattered people into a force that changed (for good as well as evil) the
course of history. What will Grace make
of me?
Lent. Six weeks to nurture the new healing, the tender green
spirit that has sprung new roots into the Ground of my Being. Forty days to reach for the light, to burrow
into the ground. Who will emerge from
the seed of the resurrection?
