Formation

Date Posted: March 5, 2025

 An Invitation to a Holy Lent

I didn’t grow up observing Lent. Well, in some ways, many aspects of life were “lenty” you might say, with a strange pressure to be watchful, but there wasn’t an intentional season or practice that supported the deeper questions I always carried in my heart. I remember when I first began observing Lent, and I was awestruck that the church had such a deep tradition of reflection and practice. While there is this question of “what will you give up?” I actually never got caught up in that. For me, Lent has always been about intentionality, about an honest engagement with my own struggles and yearnings for a deeper awareness of God’s presence. What does it mean to be fully human? What does it mean to trust the Spirit more?

I keep returning to this phrase we have used in sermons and classes for a while now: Your Life is Your Practice. I keep returning to it, because I keep needing to learn the truth of it. I need not look somewhere else to focus on how the Spirit is at work in my life. I need not get distracted by hypotheticals and such. I need only pay attention to the depths of my own life and ask how the Spirit is inviting me, challenging me, convicting me to grow and stretch beyond the patterns, assumptions, and grasping that actually limits my participation in God’s dream. My life is my practice. Our common life is our practice. Your life is your practice, because the Incarnation continues to flow through you, and God’s redeeming love is at work in your life.

As for the season itself at Grace, there are many opportunities to share and grow, and you will see some of these highlighted below for easy reference. In terms of Sundays in Lent, you will notice that we are adding photographs to this year’s bulletin covers for Lent. We have this extraordinary season when we can engage all our senses to practice our faith. From the sound of music and prayers, to the smell of incense, to the taste of bread and wine, to the feel of ash on our foreheads, to what we see in nature and in one another’s faces–these forty days call us to pay closer attention to how we notice the Spirit’s presence in our lives. You will also notice that we will begin the service each Sunday with a setting of a hymn that invites us to reflect on the Beatitudes. By having selections from this hymn each week, we can be grounded as we enter the time of worship and prayer.

We invite you to take the bulletins home and cut out the images if they speak to you. Perhaps this is a time when you can create an altar in your home, gathering images and objects from your life that help you stay grounded. Take walks when you can and see what you notice, and pay attention to what you keep close to you. Collect stones. Light candles. Put your hands in the earth. Above all, we will continue to ask ourselves how the Spirit of Christ is calling us to trust in God’s love that will transform our hearts.

Prayers for all in these holy days,
Stuart