It seems like only yesterday that we were celebrating Christmas. And now Lent is here. My thoughts on Lent are much the same as they were last year in my post Why Lent Rocks.
What’s different however is that this year I feel like Lent has arrived just at the right time for me. It’s as if it is synched up to my own spiritual life as I’ve naturally moved into a space of regrouping, taking stock, cleaning up, and looking forward. It’s pretty cool when the seasons of the liturgical year match up with how we feel in our own life. Sometimes when Christmas rolls around I’m not in a personal space of new life, or when Lent comes I’m feeling joyful and full of life! That’s the beauty of the liturgical seasons — we are able to honor the different “moods”, stories, celebrations, core beliefs, rituals, disciplines of the Church even if we are personally in a different space. For me it keeps me aware of not only our tradition but the fact that I can personally be in one space but enter into the mystery of another sacred space.
But yesterday, as I trudged through slushy snow and got smacked by snowflakes bigger than basketballs to get to the Ash Wednesday prayer service, I realized that this is where I am right here and right now in my own life and in my life as a daughter of the Church. What a blessing!
"She wrote the way she lived: on the fly, without retrospect, always on the way, climbing higher."
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Around the school, I always say to my students, “Have a Happy Lent!” Of course I get the fish eyes and “Huh” response, but as I tell them, any time you can grow closer to Jesus, any time you can grow in your awareness of just how madly in love with you Jesus is, any time you can honestly look within yourself at how little you have done to show appreciation,in word or action, for such love, and any time you can begin again, with your Beloved’s help, to “clean up your act” and get back on the right road, THAT is a happy time indeed. So, Have A Happy Lent Everyone!!
Thanks, Tom, and to you as well!
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