02/07/2024 0 Comments
From The Vicar: A Penitential Season
From The Vicar: A Penitential Season
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From The Vicar: A Penitential Season
Dear Ones of St. Columba's,
Do you feel like we have turned a corner? As I sat at my dining room table this morning sipping coffee and enjoying a couple moments of peace after Andrew got the girls on their way to school I paused to notice something that hasn't been visible in a while: the sun. It's been a minute since we've had a completely clear day, a day not only without rain but also without clouds. I have missed the mountains and our territorial views of the clear blue waters that frame them up to the west and east of us. It is time to tentatively consider what lies ahead - spring and summer. This is the time of year when we can see the light returning and say conclusively that at least as far as the weather is concerned there are better times ahead.
We are turning a corner in our church calendar as well. I know that Lent can get a bad rap because it is considered a penitential season and that word "penitential" conjures up all sorts of scary associations. It makes me think of a book I'm listening to on audio right now - Just Mercy by Bryan Stephenson. Stephenson is an attorney that works mostly with prisoners on death row, and individuals who are given life sentences while still adolescents. In a particularly heartbreaking scene in the book Bryan describes talking to one of his clients in the hour before he is executed, after telling the man that his last request for a stay has been denied. Bryan's client is a man with intellectual disability whose poverty prevented reasonable legal representation and who spoke with a pronounced stutter. As Bryan listens to his doomed client work very hard to express, through his stutter, how grateful he is to Bryan for trying to help him, Bryan Stephenson weeps silently on his end of the phone and considers giving up his work altogether.
"I realized something sitting there while Jimmy Dill was being killed at Holman prison... I understood that I don't do what I do because it's required or necessary or important. I don't do it because I have no choice. I do what I do because I'm broken too. My years of struggling against inequality, abuse of power, poverty, oppression, and injustice had finally revealed something to me about myself: being close to suffering, death, executions and cruel punishments didn't just illuminate the brokenness of others. In a moment of anguish and heartbreak it also exposed my own brokenness. You can't effectively fight...injustice and not be broken by it. We are all broken by something...We all share the condition of brokenness."
This passage spoke to me about what real penitence might look like. Lent is not a time for punishment, guilt, or shame. These are not feelings that help us, ultimately, in our quest to turn our hearts toward Jesus, or to live fully into God's call to love. But it is a time when we recognize our brokenness, together. We all share this condition of brokenness and we all hold within ourselves a deep longing to be whole: to live in a way that puts us in right relationship with God, with our world, and with each other. We do not engage in spiritual practices like Lent because it is required or necessary or important. We do it because it gets us ready to be in deeper relationship with God in Jesus Christ, and because through this preparation we are formed into people who walk the way of Love - a way that calls us into the struggles for equality, justice, hope, and truth that reveal God's kingdom as it breaks in to our own.
This Lent consider taking on practices that will call you into community with others, and connect you to our shared brokenness in order to hold fast to faith, to dream and trust together. Easter is coming, and this is our time to prepare together for the wild hope of that moment.
For more on how we are practicing Lent together, click here.
I am so grateful to be on this journey in this place, with you.
Alissa
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