"My Beloved, In Whom I am Well Pleased"

A father and his child would come to church regularly and the father’s practice was to hold the child. One Sunday morning in the midst of worship, the child was seized and writhed painfully… the father lifted him caringly, carried him to the back of the sanctuary, where he stood still rocking the child tenderly, speaking to him gently until finally the seizure relented… There was no sign of embarrassment or frustration on the father’s face, only love for the hurting child.

The pastor [Bob Welch] later said, “In that moment, while I was preaching, I was preached to. I heard God speak to my heart and say, ‘That’s the way I love you through your imperfections. I’m not embarrassed to have people know that you are my child.’” (Bob Olmstead, quoted by Megan McKenna, "Praying the Rosary")


(photo by Sally Mann)

"Today, I am announcing that next week I'll be announcing that in forty days I'll be...

An army of presidential candidates are forming exploratory committees. They are tempted to run for president and so they are testing the waters. Indeed "temptation" comes from a Latin root---temptare --- meaning “to touch, to try or test, to feel experimentally.” Most do not jump into a public campaign head first. For some, the why’s and wherefore’s probably take up to 40 days.

Scriptures read at the beginning of Lent tell of Jesus going into the desert to pray and contemplate the shape of his public ministry. He spends forty days asking himself and his God what it would mean to become “Jesus of Nazareth.” I don’t mean to be blithe, but that sounds exploratory to me. He faces three key choices of what kind of leader, what kind of person, he will be--- choices we also face--- in the form of “Satan’s Temptations”:

1.) “If you’re hungry, turn some stones into bread; that’s easy.” The temptation is the quick fix, to deal with the external illusion of a problem and ignore its internal truth. How often are we tempted to treat the symptom and not the problem?

2.) “Grab all the power and glory.” The need for all the power (and its rationale, “think of all the good I could do…”) is more than an occupational hazard for leaders, it is out-and-out pathology.

3.) “Throw yourself off a cliff, and let the angels rescue you.” – Satan keeps saying,
“Prove yourself. Show them what you can do, if you really are who you say.” The temptation is to be spectacular, to constantly prove oneself to the accompaniment of fireworks and drum rolls.

[The other side of these temptations is to think of ourselves as irrelevant (“I have nothing to say…”) powerless (“I can’t do it by myself.”) and utterly mundane (“the devil wouldn’t be interested in me.”)]

When the “temptation” before us is clearly labeled Good for You or Bad for You, or HAPPINESS or SADNESS, most of us have the sense (grace) to know what to do. But how often are our choices that clear? Most of the time we have to test the waters for ourselves. Sometimes we take over 40 days. Throughout the testing, the touching, the experimenting, we pray for wisdom and grace to grow into our choices.

TPM (some of these ideas come from Rabbi Harold Kushner.)

Rites of Spring

The Anglo-Saxons first named Lent. Year after year they watched for and welcomed the lengthening of the days: the great sun warming earth and air and sea and quickening all that lives. They named this lengthening Lent. And they saw that it was good. Like love in a cold climate, Lent-time, AKA springtime, lengthened and warmed. Inside and out.

Liturgical Lent has not always held the same warmth and quickening of life for me. I had not yet connected it with true calendar nor felt its lengthening of light and life. Its six weeks of orchestrated solemnity seemed more cerebral than celebratory. Its passion more an introduction to the darkness of fear, pain, and deprivation: more suffering than exultation. Never an Anglo-Saxon and not yet an amateur gardener, I hadn’t observed the cyclic rhythms of nature and grace which Lent names. Some of my childhood and, admittedly, later Lents seem more contraction than lengthening of spirit, more deprivation of, than clinging to. The hinges upon which this doorway to Easter rests—prayer, fasting, almsgiving, good works—seem at times precariously hung. The door sometimes too heavy, the room to which it opens too mysterious.

Yet, a central meaning emerged, an historical reenactment and a drama that skirts mystery. The story carried along by layers of language, then Aramaic and Greek and Latin; of color, still purple; scenes of deserts, crowds and suppers; accounts of a trial and a crucifixion and, ultimately of a rising and ascending, with details at once familiar and startling. I realize now, that I stood and stand at the unfolding of these events and of their retelling in rite and word, like the early Anglo-Saxons; I was observing how those heavens worked, recording the data and living the story as best I could. And now I, too, can name this time of lengthening Lent, and know it to be springtime of the soul. And it is good.

Lent-Easter, a moveable feast, is set by phases of moon, tides of history and decrees of popes and patriarchs. Its drama-reenactment-mystery constitutes the central event of Christian observance. Within our communities of believers, of watchers and namers, we lengthen and quicken. The feast moves within us—as with tide and history and decree—
and raises us up.


Mona Schwind

"The Peace of Wild Things"

When despair grows in me
and I wake in the middle of the night at the least sound
in fear what my life and my children’s lives may be.
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day blind stars
waiting for their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

--------Wendell Berry

Ready, Set,...

"Somewhere in the world, at every minute, a solemn song is being sung. Every people,every culture, sings some serious chant either of instruction, magic, praise or ecstasy.This has been true for millenia and everywhere on the globe of our world"
-----Lou Harrison

A Choir from the Russian Orthodoxy


A "Gamelan" from Java





(There is no beginning or ending to gamelan music, it is always playing in the universe, and is brought down by the orchestra and then filters up again. The large gong heard once in a while marks the "measure." Sometimes there can be as many as 120 beats to a "measure.")

“Sincerely believe in God’s justice and you conceive Christ.”
“Make humanity your way, and you shall arrive at God.” ----Augustine





Believe those who are seeking the truth;
Doubt those who find it.”
-----Andre Gide



The title of the photograph of March 26 is "TEMPTATION DOOR."