Lent starts tomorrow. A truly meaningful Lenten spiritual practice is often hard for me to settle into. The whole point is not to torture myself like I did the year at seminary when I gave up beef and, by holy week almost attacked the... check cashier at the local grocery simply because he was having a hamburger for lunch. The whole point, is to engage in a daily practice that turns my heart and mind toward God even more closely, drawing me more deeply into the relationship. Not one that sends me over the counter, through the bulletproof glass to snatch a half-eaten burger.
This summer our denomination, (the PCUSA) will vote on changing our rules to allow clergy, at their discretion, to preform same sex marriages; this only the most visible of the many seismic shifts that we will be living into as a church and a society for the foreseeable future. Everyday, I go to work as a hospital chaplain. Healthcare is one of the places in our society where the sweeping changes that are effecting us all is being figured out, worked through and live out in real lives and real time, everyday.
All this change is stressful. Produces anxiety. And, anxiety and stress, as we all know from uncomfortable experience, comes out backward and sideways when we least expect it if we spend too much time and more energy than we really have trying to stuff them down, down, down, deep inside, pretending that we aren’t being effected.
This Lent, I want, to paraphrase what I think is a popular misquote of Gandhi, ask God’s help in trying to become some small part of the change… Jesus asked us to live lives that incarnate the unimaginable grace of the Resurrection, doing what seems to impossible, “love our enemies.” To do this, we must sacrifice the hubristic protections of our anger and fear, out cherished notions of what is right and good and just and, even what is“Jesusy.”
This summer our denomination, (the PCUSA) will vote on changing our rules to allow clergy, at their discretion, to preform same sex marriages; this only the most visible of the many seismic shifts that we will be living into as a church and a society for the foreseeable future. Everyday, I go to work as a hospital chaplain. Healthcare is one of the places in our society where the sweeping changes that are effecting us all is being figured out, worked through and live out in real lives and real time, everyday.
All this change is stressful. Produces anxiety. And, anxiety and stress, as we all know from uncomfortable experience, comes out backward and sideways when we least expect it if we spend too much time and more energy than we really have trying to stuff them down, down, down, deep inside, pretending that we aren’t being effected.
This Lent, I want, to paraphrase what I think is a popular misquote of Gandhi, ask God’s help in trying to become some small part of the change… Jesus asked us to live lives that incarnate the unimaginable grace of the Resurrection, doing what seems to impossible, “love our enemies.” To do this, we must sacrifice the hubristic protections of our anger and fear, out cherished notions of what is right and good and just and, even what is“Jesusy.”
For my Lenten Practice, I'll be reading, Love Your Enemies:How To Break the Anger Habit and Be a Whole Lot Happier, by Sharon Salzberg and Robert Thurman. Thurman, Columbia University's, Je Tsongkhapa Professor of Indo-Tibetan Buddhist Studies observes that Jesus’ work helping people draw closer to God spanned only three short years while Buddha’s teaching career spanned three decades. Over all those years, Buddha had time to figure out how to help the ever-resistant human mind and heart to align themselves and our living more closely with the impossibility of loving the enemy before us and within us.
My prayer this Lent will be to prayerfully ask the Holy Spirit's help in loving my enemies as myself; even those I find coyly hidden deeply with myself.
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