a passion for holy reading after a tender dry season...

This Lent, as I find quiet ways to spend more time to simply "hanging" with Jesus, I am also being drawn back into some critical reflection, too. In addition to Vanier's commentary on the gospel according to St. John, Drawn into the Mystery of Jesus: the Gospel of John, I am also wandering through Thomas Keating's The Mystery of Christ: Liturgy as Spiritual Experience, as well as Cynthia Bourgeault's Centering Prayer and Inner Awakening. For over a year I have not touched - nor have I been inclined to touch - any holy reading. There is a stack of unread Christian Century magazines in the guest bathroom dating back to November 2017 that I have never even scanned. Indeed, I have given up my subscription after nearly 30 years of loyalty.

But now, as we have entered into the shared journey of Lent, I find that I am becoming saturated in lectio divina. To every thing there is clearly a season and a time for every purpose under heaven. I sense that I needed a lengthy term of just resting in Christ's love - a time without any institutional or intellectual expectations or demands - to simply be: to be alive, to be at rest, to be focused on tender acts of love with those closest to me, to be emotionally and spiritually dry and unfocused for a spell without worrying about it as well as everything in-between. Learning to trust the dry time and live into it without anxiety was part of my renewal. And healing. And repentance. 

In this I resonate with the words Jean Vanier used to describe an early story of Adam in Genesis. He notes that even when we believe we are lost or unmoored, God continues to search for us and reach out to us: "Scripture says that after Adam had separated himself from being enfolded in God, he hides. But God is looking for him, running after him. It is the whole mystery of God looking for us, running after us. We are not always looking for God but God is looking for us. God is looking for that part within us where we are vulnerable." That feels right to me from the inside out. 

This past year has not been one of darkness - and never one of despair. I have been through that type of wilderness before and this emptiness has not been one of pain. Rather, it has been one of acceptance. Of self-emptying and letting go. It has been my time to be quiet and listen to that still, small voice within calling me to peace. A time of trusting God as I experience the holy from the inside out. It was essential to relinquish the expectations and roles others had given me over the years, as well as the anxiety I bought into without clarity or put on myself in shame. Without a well-considered plan or timetable, I just knew that it was time to let it go. So that's what I did: I let go of my books; let go of countess records and CDs; let go of tons of visual art we have collected over five decades; let go of my habit of study, prayer, worship, ritual and countless external commitments; let go of all of my old sermon notes (except a few); and let go of my well-rehearsed daily routines. This was meant to be a time of learning who I really was without all of the externals - and that meant letting it all go.

What did I read? Mostly mysteries but also the daily reflections of Jean Vanier, Henri Nouwen and Richard Rohr. How did I worship? Mostly by walking in the woods, working in the garden, or sharing songs in community with my friends at L'Arche. Who did I see? Only my children and grandchildren, my soul mate and partner in love, my musical friends in our new band, my friends in L'Arche Ottawa and a few of our dearest friends from our days in the desert of Tucson. I found myself pondering these words from Henri Nouwen who discovered that:   

To live a spiritual life we must first find the courage to enter into the desert of our loneliness and to change it by gentle and persistent efforts into a garden of solitude. This requires not only courage but also a strong faith. As hard as it is to believe that the dry desolate desert can yield endless varieties of flowers, it is equally hard to imagine that our loneliness is hiding unknown beauty. The movement from loneliness to solitude, however, is the beginning of any spiritual life because it is a movement from the restless senses to the restful spirit, from the outward-reaching cravings to the inward-reaching search, from the fearful clinging to the fearless play.

And now, without knowing why again, my soul thirsts for deeper clarity in prayer and a new engagement with Jesus. Right now Psalm 42 speaks to me:

As a deer longs for flowing streams,

so my soul longs for you, O God.

My soul thirsts for God,

for the living God...

Deep calls to deep

at the thunder of your cataracts;

all your waves and your billows

have gone over me.

8 By day the Lord commands his steadfast love,

and at night his song is with me,

a prayer to the God of my life.

I suspect this longing is why Keating and Bourgeault are so vital: they are the spiritual wisdom keepers of mystical Western Christian contemplation. Keating articulates the intellectual, emotional and spiritual wisdom of the Lenten journey like this: 

To repent is to change the direction in which you are looking for happiness. The call to repentance is the invitation to take stock of our emotional programs for happiness based on instinctual needs and to change them. This is the fundamental program of Lent. Year by year, as the spiritual journey evolves, the destructive influences of these unevaluated programs for happiness become more obvious and, in proportionate manner, the urgency to change them increases. Thus the process of conversion is initiated and carried on... The Lenten liturgy begins with the temptations of Jesus in the desert, which deal with the three areas of instinctual need that every human being experiences in growing up. Jesus was tempted to satisfy his bodily hunger by security in magic that than in God; to jump off the pinnacle of the temple in order to make a name for himself as wonder-worker; and to fall down and worship Satan in order to receive absolute power over the nations of the world. Security, esteem, power - these are the tree classic areas where temptation works on our false programs of happiness.

                                                                                             (Keating, p. 37)

Liturgically Lent begins with Jesus wandering in the wilderness after his baptism. Keating writes: "The biblical desert is primarily a place of purification, a place of passage... not so much a geographical location - a place of sand, stones or sagebrush - as a process of interior purification leading to the liberation from the false-self system with its programs for happiness that cannot possible work." (p. 40) As I continue to wander into the wilderness of emptiness, I trust that Jesus will guide me - and we'll see what turns up. As the Gospel for today, St. Luke 4, concludes: "and when the testing was complete, the Trickster departed until another opportune time." There will be more testing for me, to be sure. More emptiness and uncertainty, too. But for now there is time to be with Jesus - and Keating, Bourgeault and Vanier as well.