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.