lent 14: barefoot.

"The feet should have more of the acquaintance of earth, and know more of flowers, freshness, cool brooks, wild thyme, and salt sand than does anything else about us... it is only those without shoes that have lively feet."  -Alice Meynell

Lent 12: holy doodling.

Two of my favorite art books are Picture This and What it is by cartoonist Lynda Barry. I love these books because she invites her readers to participate in the creative process. She encourages you to doodle, to color, to rip apart and paste back together, to draw and scribble. She takes art down from the shelf of serious high art, and into the realm of the every day. She invites her readers to play, and to stop worrying about the results. I love her books because for her being an artist doesn't mean aiming for perfection. It's much more about the process. You can listen to a wonderful interview with Barry where she describes the power of doodling on NPR here.


I love doodling. It allows me to leave my head and feel creative. It connects me to something outside of myself. Even if its just making a pattern of squiggly lines on the margins of a notepad, it helps freedom and creativity to flow. Lately, I have taken up the habit of doodling in my Bible. I use colored pencils to draw in the margins as I read. I circle and underline. I draw stars and waves and stick figures. I interact with the text. It's messy and ugly, and I'm sure not very artful to anyone but me. However, this freedom helps me get a little closer to the story. Instead, of being holy and untouchable, the word of God becomes much more personal.

I think that Christian faith is a lot like the kind of creativity that Barry describes when she talks about doodling. It's okay if we scribble and wobble and smudge and get a little messy in the process of faith. It's a beautiful thing just to get something on the page. I think too often we fear theology, the Bible, prayer or church in general because we don't want to get it wrong. But finding God is like a creative adventure; its silly and scary and meaningful. Its a journey that twists and turns and spirals. Its sacred and holy and messy. But we have to be willing to pick up our crayons and dare to be artists.

Lent 11: living portraits.

Recently, I came across the work of artist Jamie Poole over at the Colossal art blog. Poole constructs beautiful and haunting portraits out of deconstructed poems. As a lover of both poetry and art, you can imagine that I immediately fell in love with his work. You can see more of his incredible artwork at his blog.

I think part of why I find this work with word and image so compelling is because it seems to reflect on the question,"what are we made of?" By constructing images with scraps of poetry and love letters, Poole creates figures that are literally shaped with words. These portraits invite the viewer to reflect on what raw materials forge our own living portraits  If you could create a portrait to reflect who you really are out of anything, what would you choose?  At our core, are we more than cells, skin and bones? What words, images, experiences, relationships, and memories make us who we are?

For me these pieces of art are, in their own way, reflecting on the same questions Christians are trying to answer when we participate in liturgies that employ the images of ash and dust during Lent. We, too, are asking what we are made of, and searching for who we are.

During lent we are entering a time of artistry that involves both remembering and re-membering. To remember, we look back into our tradition and reflect on the ground  from which we come-- the soil that grew us. Yet, we are also re-membering, creatively constructing new self-portraits. With God's help we hope to shred up the old and reassemble the pieces into something fresh and strange and beautiful; we seek to put ourselves together again, not to be merely restored, but to be transformed. We seek to become new.

Lent 10: incomplete.

The liturgical season of Lent is the 40 days (excluding Sundays) between Ash Wednesday and Easter. Often, Sundays are thought of as "mini-Easters;" small celebrations in which we take a sabbath from our lenten disciplines in anticipation for the larger Easter to come. However, I've been thinking about how the exclusion of Sundays has a deeper meaning. When Sundays aren't counted as part of Lenten time, it gives each week a sense of incompleteness. We are waiting for wholeness, for something more. I like this unfinished feeling, not only because it reflects the anticipation of Easter, but because of how it is an accurate reflection of the spiritual life in general. It's a small reminder that we are all incomplete, that the journey is not done, and that God's work with us is not finished yet.

1 Corinthians chapter 13 reminds us, "For we know only in part, and we prophesy only in part; but when the complete comes, the partial will come to an end... For now we see in a mirror, dimly, but then we will see face to face. Now I know only in part; then I will know fully, even as I have been fully known. And now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; and the greatest of these is love."

I think it is easy to be anxious for that completeness; to get frustrated that our understanding is so limited. We can sometimes feel that our partial understanding is somehow inferior or sinful. It is easy to feel guilty and ashamed. We might find ourselves thinking that if we just tried harder things would be more perfect. Or worse, we feel completely overwhelmed and trying to grow spiritually can feel like an impossible task with no end; as if the only way we will ever see God is in some future Kingdom of Heaven, and until then we are just shit out of luck.

But Lent's incompleteness reminds me, that there is beauty in being unfinished. It is a time to dance and play in the dimness; an invitation to see all the incomplete pieces as places of imagination, hope and adventure. There is a reason that we can only see dimly: there is a shadowy beauty in the dimness. The never ending process of growing and of slowly wiping the smudge and shadow away is part of the most beautiful journey of all. The view of God that slowly emerges through the fog is more beautiful than it would be if we had all the clarity in the world.

C.S. Lewis wrote, "The sweetest thing in all my life has been the longing-- to reach the Mountain, to find the place where all the beauty came from..." I love this idea. I find peace in the idea that the longing and searching is just as sweet as what we end up discovering. My hope is that during Lent I will taste the sweetness of longing and see the magnificence my own incompleteness.

Lent 9: poem for the journey.

One way of thinking about the lenten season is as a journey into the wilderness. Today, I want to share an excerpt from one of my favorite journey poems with you. These words beckon their readers to let go of our need for order and sense, to embrace, instead, the freedom of wild exploration. They remind me that the wildness of the landscape, awakens a wildness in myself. May these words from poet A.R. Ammons bless your journey.

Corsons Inlet by A.R. Ammons

I went for a walk over the dunes again this morning
to the sea,
then turned right along
the surf
rounded a naked headland
and returned
along the inlet shore:
it was muggy sunny, the wind from the sea steady and high,
crisp in the running sand,
some breakthroughs of sun
...the walk liberating, I was released from forms,
from the perpendiculars,
straight lines, blocks, boxes, binds
of thought
into the hues, shadings, rises, flowing bends and blends of sight:
I allow myself eddies of meaning:
yield to a direction of significance
running
like a stream through the geography of my work:
you can find
in my sayings
swerves of action
like the inlet’s cutting edge:
there are dunes of motion,
organizations of grass, white sandy paths of remembrance
in the overall wandering of mirroring mind:
but Overall is beyond me: is the sum of these events
I cannot draw, the ledger I cannot keep, the accounting
beyond the account:
in nature there are few sharp lines:
there are areas of primrose
more or less dispersed;
disorderly orders of bayberry; between the rows of dunes,
irregular swamps of reeds,
...I have reached no conclusions, have erected no boundaries,
shutting out and shutting in, separating inside
from outside: I have
drawn no lines:
as manifold events of sand
change the dune’s shape that will not be the same shape tomorrow,
so I am willing to go along, to accept the becoming
thought, to stake off no beginnings or ends, establish no walls...
the moon was full last night: today, low tide was low:
black shoals of mussels exposed to the risk of air
and, earlier, of sun,
waved in and out with the waterline, waterline inexact,
caught always in the event of change.
risk is full: every living thing in
siege: the demand is life, to keep life: the small
white blacklegged egret, how beautiful,
quietly stalks and spears the shallows, darts to shore to stab—what?
blue tiny flowers on a leafless weed: carapace of crab: snail shell:
pulsations of order
in the bellies of minnows: orders swallowed,
broken down, transferred through membranes
to strengthen larger orders: but in the large view, no
lines or changeless shapes: the working in and out, together
and against, of millions of events: this,
so that I make
no form of formlessness:
... I will try
to fasten into order enlarging grasps of disorder, widening
scope, but enjoying the freedom that
Scope eludes my grasp, that there is no finality of vision,
that I have perceived nothing completely,
that tomorrow a new walk is a new walk.

Lent 8: loose change.

Some lovely thoughts from writer, film-maker and artist Miranda July:

"Maybe I had miscalculated what was left of my life. Maybe it wasn't loose change. Or actually the whole thing was loose change, from start to finish-- many, many little moments, each Holiday, each Valentine, each year unbearably repetitive and yet somehow always new. You could never buy anything with it, you could never cash it in for something more valuable or more whole. It was just all these days, held together by the fragile memory of one person-- or if you were lucky, two. And because of this, this lack of inherent meaning or value, it was stunning. Like the most intricate, radical piece of art. It dared to be nothing and so demanded everything of you."

My prayer is that Lent would be a season of noticing. Noticing the little ordinary moments that make up the loose change of our lives. May we release our desire to cash in our plain extraordinary lives in for something more. May we see how intricate and stunning it is to be alive. May we know the simple adventure of a life lived. May we notice the wild miracles of every day, and dare to give the present everything we have.

Lent 7: out of the ashes.

A week ago, we marked our faces with ashes, a sign of death and mortality, and formed a cross, a sign of hope and resurrection.  As I come to the end of the first week of Lent, my prayer is that my life would become like the mark of those ashes. Though I am small, imperfect and smudged, I pray to live a life of courage, hope and beauty. A life that offers love and grace to others. A life that brings renewal and resurrection to situations that feel hopeless.

In light of that prayer, I wanted to share this beautiful Ash Wednesday poem from Jan Richardson at the Painted Prayerbook. I love this poem because it is a reminder that Lent is not about guilt or shame, as much as it is about possibility. May it be a reminder to us all of the stars that blaze in our bones, and the wild dreams God has for our flawed and beautiful lives.

Blessing the Dust

A Blessing for Ash Wednesday
By Jan Richardson

All those days
you felt like dust,
like dirt,
as if all you had to do
was turn your face
toward the wind
and be scattered
to the four corners

or swept away
by the smallest breath
as insubstantial—

Did you not know
what the Holy One
can do with dust?

This is the day
we freely say
we are scorched.

This is the hour
we are marked
by what has made it
through the burning.

This is the moment
we ask for the blessing
that lives within
the ancient ashes,
that makes its home
inside the soil of
this sacred earth.

So let us be marked
not for sorrow.
And let us be marked
not for shame.
Let us be marked
not for false humility
or for thinking
we are less
than we are

but for claiming
what God can do
within the dust,
within the dirt,
within the stuff
of which the world
is made,
and the stars that blaze
in our bones,
and the galaxies that spiral
inside the smudge
we bear.

Lent 6: into the wreck.

In the art piece Anti-Mass by Cornelia Parker, the burnt pieces of an African American Church that was destroyed by arsonists seem to hang in mid-air. It is a haunting image of destruction and resurrection. This new form floats like a dream; its image clings like a dark memory. From the charred wreckage, something new and beautiful rises.

This art seems an appropriate source of reflection because for me the journey of Lent is very much a time of sorting through the wreckage. This desert time is an invitation to dwell in the difficult places. I look at places of hurt, violence, and destruction; the places that are flawed in myself and in the world. It is a time to feel out the rough edges and the unsettled pieces that don't fit, and to begin an act of prayerful imagination and reconstruction. In Lent, the wilderness and wreckage become a dreamscape for our exploration: a space for dreaming of how the Kingdom of God might unfold, an opportunity to look for impossible possibility.

In Adrienne Rich's wondrous poem "Diving into the Wreck" she writes:

I came to explore the wreck.
The words are purposes.
The words are maps.
I came to see the damage that was done
and the treasures that prevail. 
I stroke the beam of my lamp slowly along the flank
of something more permanent than fish or weed.

Lent is very like the journey undertaken in Parker's art and in Adrienne Rich's poem. We too are diving into the wreck and searching beneath the surface, sorting through the damage, finding treasures, tarnished and broken and bringing a small light into the murky blackness.

May your own journey into the wreck lead you to unexpected wonders.

Lent 5 - the cry of Hagar.

Picasso, Blue Nude

Recently I have taken on the challenge to read the Bible in one year. This has meant re-reading parts of Genesis that I had not read in a long time. Reading these stories, I am amazed and inspired by the women of the Bible: by their suffering, their strength, and their courage. Too often these women have been villainized and their stories treated as nothing more than cautionary tales. But reading these stories, I see in these women beauty and strength, and I also find a call for action and for prayer.

These women were used, abused and put into impossible situations. Often, their only purpose in society was as property of men and as the vessels of production of heirs. Abraham offers Sarah as a sexual partner to other men in power, claiming she is his sister, not his wife, to protect himself. Hagar, Sarah's maid, does what she is told in producing a child for Abraham, but then is cast off-- essentially sent into the wilderness with her baby son to die.  Lot's wife crumbles into salt, a tiny pile of dust, for looking back toward the life she had spent her years building for herself and her family. And Lot's daughters are offered to the men of the town as sexual objects as an act of hospitality.  Then they are abandoned by their husbands and when their husbands, mother and community all parish in the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, they are left to live out their days alone in a cave with their father. Like Hagar, they are cast off from society and forgotten. Their only hope of a future seems to be the unthinkable. I can't help imagining what tears and anguish accompanied the wine that they poured their father, as they prepared to make a future for themselves the only way they knew how: by making children with their own father.

These stories fill me with anger, with heart break and with questions. And I think that is precisely the reason that the telling of these stories is important. They awaken me to suffering that is still very much alive (read a few examples here, here or here). Much of this suffering has been ignored, accepted and even inflicted by the church.

The stories of scripture compel me to ask: how will we look for the women who have been acquired or cast off as property, who have been forced into caves, who have been abused and forgotten? How will we be like the God who saw Hagar in the wilderness and heard her crying? How will we be wells providing relief in the desert? How will we shine a light into caves where injustice and suffering is hiding?

God of gentleness and strength, break open our hearts to see the Hagars in our midst, that we may build wells for our sisters in the desert. I pray we will hear their cries for justice. I ask for compassion, anger and courage enough to join them in raising our own cries and for the strength to never be silenced. Train our ears to hear the quiet weeping of the daughters who have been offered up like objects to those who are violent and power-seeking. Open our eyes to see how we participate in the structures that work to oppress women, and keep their oppressors in positions of power. Awaken us from our sleep, that we way work to see beyond ourselves. Help us keep our eyes open even when the looking is hard, even when the looking tears us open, even when the looking breaks us. I pray for the eyes to see the dark caves where daughters are doing unthinkable things because it is their only hope of survival. Let us be the builders of bridges and doorways that provide a way out of hidden places of suffering. Let us be instruments of love building wells of grace in situations where all that seems possible is more death and tears. Help the church to be a place where women discover their own power. Where they find sisterhood. Where they find strength. Where they find a voice. Let us raise our voices for Sarah, for Hagar, for Lot's wife and Lot's daughters, for they are still in our midst and their suffering has not ended. 

A Blessing for Lent.

These words about blessing seem appropriate for first week of the Lenten Journey:

"There is a reality in blessing... It doesn't enhance sacredness, but it acknowledges it, and there is power in that. I have felt it pass through me, so to speak. The sensation is of really knowing a creature,  I mean really feeling its its mysterious life and your own mysterious life at the same time."
-Marilynne Robinson, Gilead

May we all have our eyes open to recognize all that is sacred and mysterious in and around us.

Lent 4 - forgotten places.

I've been listening to this series on Harper High School by the folks at This American Life. The stories reveal the difficult realities of educating young people in an urban high school in Chicago where violence is all too common. At Harper, social workers struggle to connect and care for kids who've learned early that trusting others and vulnerability isn't safe. Most of the high schoolers are gang members not because they made a choice, but because of what street they happen to live on.

Perhaps the most moving thing about this story is that it is not unusual. There are places like this everywhere across our country. Schools and communities that are all but forgotten by those of us who have retreated to the safety and affluence of the suburbs. Maps of the geography of our economy, like this amazing project, not only reveal how uneven the spread of wealth in the United States is, but also just how clear the dividing lines have become.

As I look at those maps and hear the stories of the kids at Harper High, I am reminded that to be a person of Christian faith, is to be a person called to those underserved and ignored places. It means we cannot rest in our communities of safety, while others suffer. Over and over our scriptures proclaim that God is for the oppressed, the poor and the broken. Psalm 9 promises, "The needy shall not always be forgotten," and cries out to God to "Rise Up!" on their behalf.

As we follow God into the wilderness of Lent, I believe that we too are called to Rise Up. Of course there are no easy solutions to cycles of poverty and violence. The problems are complicated and all mixed up with economics, race, politics, education and more layers than I can name here. But complexity is not an excuse to be still or silent.

I have to ask myself: How will I be God's hands and feet? How am I willing to risk my comfortable life and stand with and for others? These are the questions that I face this Lenten season, and which I confess I have not spent enough time answering with my life.

Part of the answer for me has to do with partnering with schools like Harper, and supporting teachers and students in their work. As I look around my apartment, filled with shelves that are overwhelmed by too many books-- more books than we will ever have time to read-- I am reminded that for too many young people around the world, education is a luxury they struggle to access. Last year I volunteered weekly with this great organization called Reading Partners that partners volunteers with students in inner-city schools to give them one-on-one tutoring to get them caught up in reading. This year, when my weekly tutoring no longer fit into my schedule, I did not work to find another option to replace it.

I don't know exactly how I will move forward, but I know that I come into this season of Lent repentent, aware of how much work I have left undone, and prayerful that God will open my eyes to the forgotten places, and give all of us the courage to rise-up against injustice and inequality in all its forms.

Lent 3 - to be carried.

Looking out
toward the horizon,
I cannot even begin
to imagine its vastness
this churning ocean.
From land, I can glimpse
only the edge, the rumpled
surface. We want more--
of course-- we cannot
help it. This wanting
that will not cease
reminds us that we are still
alive, still human.
But there are instances
seeing the flickering flames
of the ocean rising to
meet the earth, when
the landscape is so alive
with color, with motion,
that you allow yourself
to be held by the moment
and you find yourself
daring to think, It is enough
to come to the edge of the 
known world, dreaming.
It is enough to watch the boats
be carried across the water.
It is enough
to be carried. 

Lent 2 - Return.

Return again, return again,
Return to the land of your soul.
Return to who you are.
Return to what you are.
Return to where you are.
Return to the land of your soul.
Born and reborn again, 
Born and reborn again,
Return to the land of your soul.
Return again, return again
Return to the land of your soul. 
-Shlomo Carlebach


My spiritual director recently shared with me this beautiful song from Jewish Rabbi, musician and composer Shlomo Carlebach. All week I've been humming the tune-- walking, working, and praying to its rhythm. This simple chant has been haunting me, beautifully urging me to ask the question: what does it mean to return?

For me the season of lent is very much about returning: coming back into relationship with God, returning my life into the hands that formed me, so that I might be reformed again.
When I think of returning to the land of my soul, this has profound implications. First, I think of the ground, the earth, the dust-- the place where in the story of creation life is literally formed. This land from which we are born, is ultimately the land which receives us in our death. I am reminded that life is fragile and fleeting, and that in a quite literal way all of life is this cycle of returning from where we came. The call to return is also an opportunity to remember our journey, to think back to the people, the places, and the moments that shaped us. We are able to return our attention to our own journey; to look back over the map of our spiritual life and see ways we met God's presence. We take time to remember the seasons, sacred and ordinary, where we have been born and reborn.

This sort of spiritual return is not a futile exercise of looking backwards and mourning a lost time or place. The return I seek is not to turn back to some ideal Eden, or a hopeless desire to find a place or a moment in time where my relationship with God is perfect. But returning again means for me to return anew. To come back to my spiritual life, my memories, my journey fresh with new insights, new questions, new experiences, and new scars. To return to the here and now of the present moment.

T.S. Eliot wrote: "We shall not cease from exploration / And the end of all our exploring / Will be to arrive where we started / And know the place for the first time."

To "return again to the land of your soul" is something like that. It is, in a sense, a spiritual home-coming, but it is also a new beginning.

Today I come to the door of mystery and try to glimpse God again for the first time.

Lent 1 - beautiful things.

Each year, on Ash Wednesday I return again to our God who looks into the dust and finds beauty. As the ashes are placed on my head, I encounter the Divine Creativity that reaches into the dirt of the ordinary, and sees fit to breathe new life. I am humbled and inspired by the reminder we are all made up of dust and dirt, blood and bones, and that from these raw materials such abundant life can come.

In Gilead, a masterfully written book by Marilynne Robinson, the main character observes that the beautiful is all mixed up with the ordinary, the messy, the grime:

"I really can't tell what's beautiful anymore. I passed two young fellows on the street the other day... They work at the garage. They're not churchgoing, either one of them, just decent rascally young fellows who have to be joking all the time, and there they were, propped against the garage wall in the sunshine, lighting up their cigarettes. They're always so black with grease and so strong with gasoline I don't know why they don't catch fire themselves. They were passing remarks back and forth the way they do and laughing that wicked way they have. And it seemed beautiful to me. It is an amazing thing to watch people laugh, the way it sort of takes them over."

This season I hope I can see through the eyes of this character, who seems to me much like the God who sees beauty in the dust. Lent is not only an opportunity to fast, repent and return to the Lord, but also an invitation to look outward, to find God in the dust and ashes in our midst. To see where the Divine is already alive and present. To open our eyes to beautiful things everywhere.