Prayer, Care, Share: Three Invitations for Lent

"We remember the wilderness days of Jesus: his lonely struggle with the inner tempter, with wild beasts for company and angels attending to his needs. We struggle too, in a cluttered wilderness of busy-ness, possessed by our possessions. We leave no room for wild beasts or angels. We cannot see the starlit glory of the desert sky. Holy One, help us to be still... The wilderness is not a place to stay, we are not born for solitude. Jesus wrestled there alone and won his holy struggle with himself. Then he left it, knowing his purpose. May we too leave the wilderness with new resolve." 

From A Lenten Meditation by Cliff Reed

"'Repent' means 'Turn to God.' .. During Lent.. we are invited to a conversion: not to turn towards ourselves in introspection or individual perfectionism, but to seek communion with God and also communion with others.. Lent is a season that invites us to share.. During this time of Lent let us dare to review our lifestyle, not to make those who do less feel guilty, but for the sake of solidarity with the deprived. The gospel encourages us to share freely while setting everything in the simple beauty of creation.” 

Brother Alois, Prior of the Taize Community.

In the Catholic tradition, the three pillars of Lent are prayer, fasting, and almsgiving. I like to translate these as: prayer, care, and share or giving to God/ Spirit/Love/however you like to name the sacred, giving to ourselves, and giving to others. For me, these are invitations to deepening into spiritual practice, to simplicity, and to focus on helping others – time to let go of the things I don't need and focus on the essentials, to love silence, nourish my soul, and pay attention to what I can do for the benefit of others. 

In the gospel stories, we are told that the Spirit that descends upon Jesus at his baptism, drives him into the wilderness, where he spends forty days praying and fasting, accompanied by wild beasts, angels, and satanic visions:

“"In those days Jesus came from Nazareth of Galilee and was baptized by John in the Jordan. And just as he was coming up out of the water, he saw the heavens torn apart and the Spirit descending like a dove on him. And a voice came from heaven, “You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased.” And the Spirit immediately drove him out into the wilderness. He was in the wilderness forty days, tempted by Satan; and he was with the wild beasts; and the angels waited on him. Now after John was arrested, Jesus came to Galilee, proclaiming the good news of God, and saying, “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near; repent, and believe in the good news.”" Mark 1:9-15

If you are familiar with indigenous American spirituality, you might recognize this as a vision quest, an initiation, when the individual spends time alone in nature without food, communing with the spirits in order to receive guidance on the way forward. In other words, this is a time of discernment, from which Jesus emerges to begin his ministry. 

I like to use Lent as a period of discernment – to focus on spending time in silence to listen for the still, small voice within – to discern where I will put my focus during the coming months of summer when I have more energy to be more active – to “leave the wilderness with new resolve” as Cliff Reed put it.

The Gospels of Luke and Matthew go into more detail than Mark about the temptations of Jesus. In Luke we are told,

“The devil said to him, “If you are the Son of God, command this stone to become a loaf of bread.” Jesus answered him, “It is written, ‘One does not live by bread alone.’” Then the devil led him up and showed him in an instant all the kingdoms of the world. And the devil said to him, “To you I will give their glory and all this authority; for it has been given over to me, and I give it to anyone I please. If you, then, will worship me, it will all be yours.” Jesus answered him, “It is written, ‘Worship the Lord your God, and serve only him.’” Then the devil took him to Jerusalem, and placed him on the pinnacle of the temple, saying to him, “If you are the Son of God, throw yourself down from here, for it is written, ‘He will command his angels concerning you, to protect you,’ and ‘On their hands they will bear you up, so that you will not dash your foot against a stone.’” Jesus answered him, “It is said, ‘Do not put the Lord your God to the test.’” When the devil had finished every test, he departed from him until an opportune time.” Luke 4:3-13

Commenting on this passage, Prof. Becky Horst writes, “In the desert, Jesus experiences three temptations, each more intense than the last.. He is able to reject comfort, security and control as motivators for his life. Instead he will embrace risk, vulnerability and suffering for a cause much larger than himself.”

I appreciate this invitation to discern or notice where I am motivated by comfort, security, and control, and to embrace risk, vulnerability, and (in place of the word suffering I'm going to use the word) discomfort, instead. 

"Fast from hurting words … and say kind words. Fast from sadness … and be filled with gratitude. Fast from anger … and be filled with patience. Fast from pessimism … and be filled with hope. Fast from worries … and have trust in God. Fast from complaints … contemplate simplicity. Fast from pressures … and be prayerful. Fast from bitterness … fill your hearts with joy. Fast from selfishness … and be compassionate to others. Fast from grudges … and be reconciled. Fast from words … be silent and listen." Pope Francis

Pope Francis' wonderful words on fasting invite us to notice where we are behaving from anger or bitterness or selfishness, not to beat ourselves up, but to be inspired to cultivate positive alternatives - kindness, gratitude, patience, hope, trust, joy, compassion, forgiveness..

Perhaps this noticing is for me the main invitation of Lent – to notice and pay attention to both my inner and outer life – to notice and pay attention to the sacred in the ordinary – to be redeemed via “the radio, the hokey-cokey, and tins of cold custard” as Rabbi Lionel Blue once noted – in my case, those things may be podcasts, singing in the rain, and apple crumble.

Lent is also a time for me to accept Brother Alois' invitation that I began with to “dare to review our lifestyle.. for the sake of solidarity with the deprived” - to notice and pay attention to the resources I can share with others, whether that be money or time or kind words or a listening ear. 

"Is such the fast I desire, a day for men to starve their bodies? Is it bowing the head like a bulrush and lying in sackcloth and ashes? Do you call that a fast, a day when the Lord is favourable? No, this is the fast I desire: To unlock fetters of wickedness and untie the cords of the yoke, to let the oppressed go free; to break off every yoke. It is to share your bread with the hungry, and to take the wretched poor into your home; when you see the naked, to clothe him, and not to ignore your own kin." Isaiah 58:5-7

The prophet Isaiah, never one to mince his words, makes it very clear here that fasting should not be about self-denial, but about bringing justice to those less fortunate than ourselves – freeing the oppressed, sharing our bread with the hungry and housing the poor. 

Time and again the Hebrew prophets warned their people away from public displays of piety which tried to hide their hypocrisy, and reminded them that it is our motivations and actions that are important. Unitarians are inheritors of that wisdom, with our emphasis on 'deeds, not creeds.'

Blessing adapted from a prayer of St Ambrose,

“This Lent, let your door stand open to receive Love, unlock your soul, offer a welcome to all, and you will see the riches of simplicity, the treasures of peace, and the joy of grace.” Amen.

Three Loves, One Love: A Reflection for St Valentine's Day

"I heard a voice speaking to me: ‘The young woman whom you see is Love.  She has her tent in eternity…It was love which was the source of this creation in the beginning when God said: ‘Let it be! And it was. As though in the blinking of an eye, the whole creation was formed through love. The young woman is radiant in such a clear, lightning-like brilliance of countenance that you can’t fully look at her… She holds the sun and moon in her right hand and embraces them tenderly… The whole of creation calls this maiden ‘Lady.’ For it was from her that all of creation proceeded, since Love was the first. She made everything… Love was in eternity and brought forth, in the beginning of all holiness, all creatures without any admixture of evil. Adam and Eve, as well were produced by love from the pure nature of the Earth." 

A Vision of Creation, from the letters of St. Hildegard of Bingen (1098 - 1179) 

“One of them, a lawyer, asked him [Jesus] a question, to test him. “Teacher, which is the great commandment in the law?” And he said to them, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind. This is the great and first commandment. And a second is like it, You shall love your neighbour as yourself. On these two commandments depend all the law and the prophets.”” Matthew 22: 35 – 40

Jesus links the two commandments given in Deuteronomy 6:5 (You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might) and Leviticus 19:18 (Do not seek revenge or bear a grudge against anyone among your people, but love your neighbour as yourself), and says that they are alike – loving God, loving yourself and loving your neighbour. 

This is the great Truth that the mystics awaken to – there is no separation. There is no separation between God and ourselves. There is no separation between the self and others. The three loves are one love. “The day of my spiritual awakening was the day I saw God in all things and all things in God,” said Mechthild of Magdeburg. 

"These three loves are engendered by one another, nourished by one another, and fanned into flame by one another. Then they are all brought to perfection together." From The Mirror of Charity by Aelred of Rievaulx (1110 – 1167) 

Aelred of Rievaulx expands on Jesus' words in the Gospel of Matthew, and describes how the three loves are intertwined, flowing from and to each other, ultimately becoming one love, which is love of God in everyone. 

There are many different types of love. While there is an element of eros, of passionate, romantic love, in the divine devotion of many mystics, in New Testament Greek, the love between God and humanity is usually rendered as “agape,” sometimes translated as “charity” in early English translations. Today we might perhaps translate it as “loving kindness” or “compassion” or “unconditional love.”

Martin Luther King Jr. describes agape as, “understanding, creative, redemptive good will toward all men. Agape is an overflowing love which seeks nothing in return. Theologians would say that it is the love of God operating in the human heart.” Agape is thus love both between God and humanity and between humans. This is the type of love that manifests in service. 

The mystics tell us we are created in love and for love. Love that manifests in service to God, to others, and to ourselves. Hildegard von Bingen, whose vision of Creation from Love we heard earlier, wrote that God said, “With my mouth I kiss my own chosen creation. I uniquely, lovingly, embrace every image I have made out of the earth's clay. With a fiery spirit I transform it into a body to serve the world.”

In the churches I grew up in, Jesus' words were often shortened to “love your neighbour”. But Jesus, and Moses before him, didn't just say, “love your neighbour”, they said, “love your neighbour as yourself.” Loving ourselves wasn't spoken about much in church and certainly not in positive terms. Loving others was seen as self-less, while loving oneself was equated with being self-ish, self-important, and self-indulgent. But we cannot truly love others, we cannot truly love God, unless we first love ourselves.

Contemporary contemplative Christian teacher Justin Coutts writes, “To truly love God is to love what God loves and it is us which God loves most. Therefore, in the pursuit of the love of God we must begin with ourselves. When we truly love ourselves then we see ourselves as God does. Because we are the image of God we can only love God as much as we first love ourselves. If we do not love ourselves we are seeing a false image that is not of God. If we saw, with eyes truly opened, who we really are, then we would have no choice but to love ourselves. If we do not love ourselves then we do not have the truth.”

Now I acknowledge that my understanding of God is likely to be very different from that of the biblical writers. I have long since left the white-bearded old man in the clouds of my Sunday School days behind. The God of my understanding is what the theologian Paul Tillich called the “ground of being.” In other words, my God is Life itself. In loving God I love Life itself, and I am called to serve God, to serve Life, by acting in life-affirming and life-enriching ways.

In loving my neighbour, I am called to serve them, in ways that affirm and enrich their life. Who is my neighbour? In the passages from Deuteronomy and Leviticus, we are asked to love our kin, our fellow country-folk, and strangers. In other words, everyone – everyone, from my cousins to the politicians I disagree with to the people blowing each other up in Israel and Gaza. 

In loving my neighbour, I am called to manifest that love in service, in good will to all, in seeking what is good for my neighbour's welfare, in acting kindly and compassionately towards them, treating them with respect and understanding. Every act of love in action, however small, from hugging a friend to donating to charity to smiling at a stranger, is an act of service that makes a difference.

In loving myself, I am called to manifest that love in service, seeking what is good for my own welfare, treating myself with kindness, compassion, respect and understanding.

May we answer the call to love God, love our neighbour, love ourselves, knowing that these three loves are indeed one and we are indeed one family, created in Love and for Love, and held in a Love larger than ourselves. Amen.

The Transformational Energy of Brigid: A Reflection for Imbolc

"I will rest now at the bottom of Bridget’s well

I will follow the crow’s way

Footprint by footprint

In the mud down here

I won’t come up

Until I am calmed down

And the earth dries beneath me

And I have paced the caked ground

Until smooth all over

It can echo a deeper voice

Mirror a longer shadow

Then the fire may come again

Beneath me, this time

Rising beyond me

No narcissus-flinted spark

Behind closed eyes

But a burning bush

A fire that always burns away

But never is burnt out"

Bridget’s Well by Richard Kearney

Brigid, Goddess and Saint, whose feast day is celebrated on 1st February, is close to my heart. She is known of the Bringer of Light, the Herald of Spring, embodying the transformation of the earth from the darkness and dormancy of winter to the first signs of the new life and growth of spring.  She clears away the debris of winter, cleansing the energy to allow us to move forward with clear vision and positive intention.  But her message of transformation is deeper than a little spring cleaning.

Brigid is a Goddess and Saint of both fire and water.  In Kildare in Ireland, the site of St Brigid’s convent, St Brigid’s flame is kept constantly burning in her shrine by the sisters, and there are now many other Brigid’s flames across the world.  In Ireland there are many sacred wells dedicated to Brigid and pilgrimages are made to them to ask for her blessing at this time of year.  Brigid is patron goddess of poetry, healing and smith-craft.  The elements of fire and water combine in the forge, where raw materials are transformed into objects that are both beautiful and useful.

A Celtic seasonal story tells that the Cailleach, the crone of winter, can transform herself from a terrifying hag in the dark half of the year to the beautiful young maiden Brigid in the light half by drinking from the well of youth, and thus Brigid and the Cailleach are the same entity.  I believe that this archetypal feminine energy has much to teach us today about balance, healing and wholeness.

The heroic quest in world mythologies often includes gaining wisdom through an initiation involving embracing surrender, darkness and death, as symbolised by the Cailleach, hag or crone.  For example, a common Celtic tale tells of how the hero becomes king only when he kisses the hag, who transforms into a beautiful woman and reveals herself as sovereignty.

In the Irish story ‘Niall of the Nine Hostages’, the old women or hag is guarding a well.  When Niall’s four brothers ask for a drink of water, she tells them they must give her a kiss.  They all refuse, but Niall kisses and embraces the hag, whereupon she changes into the most beautiful woman in the world.  “What are you?” asks Niall and she replies, “King of Tara, I am Sovereignty . . . your seed shall be over every clan.” In order to access the life-giving waters of the well, the young man must embrace the dark face of the feminine.  He emerges from his initiation with the wisdom and compassion of maturity to a path of life-sustaining leadership.

In her article, 'Brigid: Cailleach and Midwife to a New World', Dolores Whelan says, “The cailleach is the embodiment of the tough mother-love that challenges its children to stop acting in destructive ways.. It is an energy that insists that we stand still, open our hearts, and feel our own pain and the pain of the earth. This is the energy that teaches us how to stay with the process when things are difficult.”

I found this a really powerful message.  In Western society we are all under pressure to be constantly doing things, to react quickly, to keep moving from one thing to the next.  There is little room for considered responses or for just being.  But if we are to live in right relationship with the earth I think it is important for us to value reflection and attentiveness, to consider consequences, and to allow life to unfold.

At Imbolc the maiden Brigid embodies the new life energy of the tiny spark of light that has been growing in the Cailleach’s dark womb since the winter solstice and now begins to emerge and transform winter into spring. The awakening of spring can only emerge from the deep sleep stillness of Winter.  Spring shows us that the possibility of transformation is always there, no matter how devitalised something appears.  Renewal can happen when we submit to the slow transformational energy of Bridget’s well.

As Philosopher Richard Kearney suggests in the poem “Bridget’s Well” the inward and downward journey into the deep well is the way to access Brigid’s life-giving and inspiring fire of passion that lies at the bottom. The journey deep into the darkness of the winter of our souls may be uncomfortable and painful at times, but eventually we find that inner spark that lives within us all.  Emerging from a clear deep space of stillness, this fire is full of potency, the inner light of truth guiding us into a new life of wholeness.

I have had my own experience of Brigid’s well.  Many years ago I was bullied by a superior at work over the course of several months. I began internalising all the negativity towards me, thinking it must be me in the wrong.  I dreaded going into work so much that I began to have panic attacks on the bus in the mornings.  One day I snapped and broke down.  My doctor signed me off work for six weeks.  By this time I was in such poor mental health that I couldn’t sleep or eat.  I was terrified of not finding a new job and applied frantically for everything I saw that seemed even vaguely suitable.  Luckily I was offered a new job within the first few weeks, which meant I was then able to concentrate on recovering.  

Not having work to fill my days was very strange at first.  I had to slow down.  I began to take long walks along with river and through the woods every day.  Walking in nature has always been restorative for me. I was also lucky to have supportive friends and family who helped me on the road to recovery. It took a long time to heal, but by the end of the six weeks I was ready to return to work.  I had begun to stop flailing around in the mud in the bottom of the well.  I had found find that divine inner spark that allowed me to see that the layers of self-loathing I had accumulated weren’t the true heart of me and I began to rediscover my self-worth.

Elizabeth Kubler Ross once said, “People are like stained-glass windows.  They sparkle and shine when the sun is out, but when the darkness sets in, their inner beauty is revealed only if there is a light within.”

We live in dark and troubled times.  Such times bring out both the worst and the best in people.  Sometimes we may feel overwhelmed, but just as we cannot transform our shadow selves by ignoring them and hoping they will go away, we cannot transform the dark forces of the world by shutting them out.  It is only by bringing the dark things out of the shadows into the light that we can see them for what they truly are and slowly but surely begin to transform them.

I believe that Brigid’s fire has the power to inspire us to forge new relationships between each other, and between people and the land, to transform the winter wasteland of the world into a life-sustaining spring.

Let us be keepers of the flame of truth, meaning, love and deep connection.  

Let us be bringers of light to the world. Amen and Blessed Be.

The Coming of Bride by John Duncan, 1917