The Lenten Invitation . .

"Create in me a clean heart, O God, and renew a right spirit within me . . . The sacrfice of God is a troubled spirit; a broken and contrite heart, O God, you will not despise." - Psalm 51:11,18

"I invite you, therefore, in the name of the Church, to the observance of a holy Lent." - Book of Common Prayer, p. 265

Dear Friends in Christ -

Because the invitation to a holy Lent is accompanied by instructions to pray, fast, repent and give to those in need, we may be tempted to think that the purpose of this season is to get us straightened out and perfected. It's not. The purpose of this season is not perfection, but CONNECTION, connection with the God of our salvation.

For many of us, the thing that gets in the way of our connection with God is not failing to try hard enough but, rather, trying too hard. We work, we sweat, and we struggle. Then we berate ourselves for our shortcomings, we feel guilty about our failures, and we worry about what we might have done better. We think we can do it. We think we should do it.

For thousands and thousands of years, Hebrew and Christian spirituality was based in an understanding of a perfect God and imperfect human beings. But with the Industrial Age came a fresh sense of empowerment - and power. Surely human beings who could make bright shiny things in the world could also perfect themselves. In the late 1800s and early 1900s, Christian churches - Catholic and Protestant - emphasized greater "holiness" - and became increasingly rigid, moralistic and judgemental. As striving for perfection was encouraged, faith started to flag, because experience taught something different than the church was teaching. People discovered that the pursuit of perfection was fatally flawed. No matter how hard they tried, they never "got there."

A spiritual revolution sprang up in the 1930s. Bill W. and his companions started exploring a spirituality that was ancient, but also proved practical for modern times. Their quest for sobriety and their desire to really live was characterized by getting things back in the right order. They said, "First of all, we had to quit playing God."

In the season of Lent, we are invited to disciplines of prayer, fasting, repentance and giving, not as a way to perfect ourselves, but as a way to discover over and over again how God saves us. As a way to see - one day at a time - that God is God and we are not. We are people who need God.

Today, the black ashes we wear on our foreheads call us back to the foundation: "Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return." We receive these ashes as a reminder of our fragile, flawed nature and as an invitation to connection with the God of our salvation.

Faithfully,
Janet+

(PS - I've missed a couple of days of posting, so before I push further into my Lenten discipline of writing here each day, I'm going to post things for the last three days . . . if you're curious, go back and take a peek!)