Tag: Lenten meditation

Lenten Meditation: Arise, Shine

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Arise, shine, for your light has come,
and the glory of the LORD rises upon you.
Isaiah 60:1

We’ve not known major natural catastrophe here in the northwest for many generations–our crises are mercifully small scale compared to a Japan or New Orleans or Haiti.  Blustery windstorms, flooding, the occasional drifting blizzard, spouting volcanoes, the rare minor earthquake.

Awaking to a glowing sunrise is encouragement after such an event. Clouds become a canvas backdrop on which a vivid palette is able to be painted–the same clouds that had created havoc, floods, power outages.

Then this.

Startling, wondrous magnificence beyond imagination. Grace that brings us to our knees, especially when we are mired in trouble.

Drink deeply of this.

Hold it, savor it and know that to witness any sunrise is to see the face of God.

Lenten Meditation: Refined and Scrubbed

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But who can endure the day of his coming?
Who can stand when he appears?
For he will be like a refiner’s fire or a launderer’s soap.
Malachi 3:2

While looking at pictures of burning buildings in Japan after the earthquake,  it is wholly evident that much of the infrastructure in the effected areas is being completely consumed by fire, if it wasn’t swept away in the waves.  It is being quickly destroyed,  to eventually be rebuilt from the ground up.  There is nothing but debris, nothing left to salvage.

Yet we are told that God does not destroy his people like these buildings are destroyed.  Instead our debris and impurities are wiped away, as if painfully scrubbed by soap or refined by fire.  We are left whole, intact and unsullied.

Only then can we be ready for what is to come.

Lenten Meditation: Once More in a Little While

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Oarai City, Ibaraki Prefecture, northeastern Japan, March 11, 2011. (REUTERS/Kyodo)

For thus says the LORD of hosts,
Once more in a little while,
I am going to shake the heavens and the earth, the sea also and the dry land.
I will shake all the nations; and they will come with the wealth of all nations,
and I will fill this house with glory,’ says the LORD of hosts.
Haggai 2:6-7

This could have been anywhere on the earth–and it has been at one time or another over many millennia.  We happen to live on uneasy soil.  Most recently the devastation has been in Chile, Haiti, Sumatra, Philippines.   It could have been right here in the earthquake prone and long overdue Pacific Northwest. I tread carefully across the yard, wondering if with the next step, the earth will rise to meet my foot, alive and seething.

This time it happened near one of the largest cities on earth, right where people most precious to me in all the world live and work.  It just happened, whisking away thousands of people in a matter of minutes.

There are many interpretations about what this might mean.  Some imply it is judgment.  Some dismiss it as simple relief of seismic pressure, building since the last major earthquake in the area in 869 A.D.

I believe it happens “once more, in a little while.”  It is a reminder we are only along for the ride;  we don’t do the steering, and we’re not in control of the itinerary or the timing of the destination.  We are shaken awake, not out of judgment (which has already convicted us all), but with the shattering realization that our rescue is at hand.

We must reach out and hang on tight, once more, in a little while.

Lenten Meditation: Rough Places

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Mt. Baker--photo by Josh Scholten at http://www.cascadecompass.com

Every valley shall be exalted,
every mountain and hill made low;
the crooked straight,
and the rough places plain.  Isaiah 40:4

Gazing out our kitchen window, we see the strong silhouette of Mt. Baker every morning, unchanging and unblinking as the clouds swirl past, the snow falls, or the sun shines.   The peaks are just as impressive as they must have been for the coastal native populations centuries ago, with the river valleys at its feet just as green and lush.

As permanent as it seems, it is an active volcano, still steaming from its vent on the coldest of mornings, a plume visible from our farmhouse dozens of miles away.  The lesson of Mount St. Helen taught us that the constancy of rocky peaks is illusory.  In an instant it can be laid low, the valleys obliterated in a sea of lava, the rivers gorged and gushing with mud, the ragged geography covered and soon forgotten.

There is nothing permanent under the firmament. Every earthquake and tsunami, as happened in Japan only an hour ago just a couple hundred miles from where our son lives and teaches, proves that again and again.

All that is lasting is the kingdom of our God incarnate, who walked in living flesh on this impermanent earth,  in order to bring His people to home everlasting.

Knowing this, we can be rough no more.

Lenten Meditation–Make Straight

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The voice of him that cries in the wilderness,
prepare ye the way of the Lord.
Make straight in the desert
a highway
for our God.

Isaiah 40:3

This is the time of year when I get off track.   Lost and wandering in a wilderness of winter doldrums,  I have too much to do at work, too little time at home and farm cherishing the precious relationships in my life.

Winter still clings like a cement suit having become a desert of deprivation gone on too long.   I yearn for respite.

And so today, a voice cries out to prepare.

It is time to look where I’m going, to walk a path with a goal in mind, and stop meandering meaninglessly.   My path, if straight and true,  will join thousands of others harkening to the call.

I am not alone on this road.  Nor are you.

Lenten Meditation: It Was As His Flesh: Ours

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'The Incredulity of St.Thomas' by Caravaggio ca.1601, at the Neues Palais, Potsdam

Seven Stanzas for Easter by John Updike

Make no mistake: if He rose at all
it was as His body;
if the cells’ dissolution did not reverse, the molecules
reknit, the amino acids rekindle,
the Church will fall.

It was not as the flowers,
each soft Spring recurrent;
it was not as His Spirit in the mouths and fuddled
eyes of the eleven apostles;
it was as His flesh: ours.

The same hinged thumbs and toes,
the same valved heart
that–pierced–died, withered, paused, and then
regathered out of enduring Might
new strength to enclose.

Let us not mock God with metaphor,
analogy, sidestepping, transcendence;
making of the event a parable, a sign painted in the
faded credulity of earlier ages:
let us walk through the door.

The stone is rolled back, not papier-mâché,
not a stone in a story,
but the vast rock of materiality that in the slow
grinding of time will eclipse for each of us
the wide light of day.

And if we will have an angel at the tomb,
make it a real angel,
weighty with Max Planck’s quanta, vivid with hair,
opaque in the dawn light, robed in real linen
spun on a definite loom.

Let us not seek to make it less monstrous,
for our own convenience, our own sense of beauty,
lest, awakened in one unthinkable hour, we are
embarrassed by the miracle,
and crushed by remonstrance.

—John Updike, “Seven Stanzas At Easter,” 1964

Empty Tomb by Barbara Adams

Lenten Meditation: Sometimes it causes me to tremble…

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Today was dismal with extreme winds and rain.  The sun threatened to disappear but it didn’t.  Even so, it felt like it should.  Today was that kind of day.  Not good.  Not good at all.  Sometimes it causes me to tremble…

There is nothing good about what happened that day–the rejection, the denials, the trumped up charges, the beatings, the burden of carrying a heavy weight through jeering crowds, the thorns,  the nails, the suffocation, the thirst, the despair of being forsaken.

But all this cannot defeat God.  On this day, there is courage to surrender, there is forgiveness, there is compassion, there is grace,  there is sacrifice, there is a debt paid.  The Son takes on our inquity, brings us face to face with our Father and will bring us home.

Sometimes it causes me to tremble.

Such a good, such a very Good Friday.

Lenten Meditation: Many Rooms

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John 14: 1-3

Do not let your hearts be troubled.  Trust in God; trust also in me.  In my Father’s house are many rooms; if it were not so, I would have told you.  I am going there to prepare a place for you.  And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come back and take you to be with me that you also may be where I am.


It was meant to be reassurance: trust me, don’t be troubled, I will return.  Looking back, it is powerfully reassuring, but at the time it must have been greatly puzzling.  There would have been too much to absorb and understand in these few words.

Certainly it is reassuring there will be plenty of room as well as plenty of rooms.  We are a diverse flock–each unique from the next, yet there is room for everyone.  Despite our differences, there will be a dwelling place prepared and ready,  able to fit us all in.

And most reassuring of all–nothing is hidden from us, even if we don’t always understand what we hear and read.  “If it were not so, I would have told you.”

There is a welcome mat, an open door, a room prepared specifically for us, and we will be guided there.

No need to be troubled.  Trust me.


Lenten Meditation: Living in the Shadows

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The first time I saw him last year was just a flash of gray ringed tail
Disappearing into the autumn night mist as I opened the back door
To pour kibble into the empty cat dish on the porch: another
Stray cat among many who visit the farm. A few stay.

So he did, keeping a distance in the shadows under the trees.
A gray tabby with white nose and bib, serious yet skittish,
Watching me as I moved about feeding dogs, cats, birds, horses,
Creeping to the cat dish only when the others drifted away.

There was something in the way he held his head,
A floppy forward ear betrayed hidden wounds I could not approach to see.
I startled him one day as he ate his fill at the dish. He ran away
His head flashing red, his back scalp missing from forehead to neck.

Not oozing or bleeding, nor something new. A nearly mortal scar
From an encounter with coyote, or eagle or bobcat.
This cat was thriving despite his trauma and pain,
His tissue raw, trying to heal. He had chosen to live.

My first inclination was to trap him, to put him humanely to sleep
To end his suffering, in truth to end my distress at seeing him every day,
Envisioning the florid flesh even as he hunkered invisible in the shadowlands.
Yet disfigurement did not keep him from eating well or licking clean his pristine fur.

As much as I wanted to look away, to avoid confronting his mutilation,
I greeted him from a distance, acknowledging his maimed courage,
Through wintry icy blasts, and four foot snow, through spring rains and summer heat with flies,
His scar never quite healed, a sanguine reminder of approaching mortality.

I never will stroke that silky fur, or feel his burly purr, assuming he still knows how,
But still I feed him his daily fill, as he feeds my need to recall:
Each breath he takes is sacred air, no matter how deep his wounds,
Nor how much, because he lives, he continues to bleed red.

Lenten Meditation: From the lips of children

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Matthew 21:16

“Do you hear what these children are saying?” [the chief priests and teachers of the law] asked him. “Yes,” replied Jesus, “have you never read, ‘From the lips of children and infants you have ordained praise’?”

Children have a gift of getting to the heart of the matter.   The children in the temple during Holy Week continued to shout and praise Jesus’ name, shouting “Hosanna!”  just as they had done on the road to Jerusalem on Sunday.  For them, the triumph was not over.  The children continued to celebrate when the adults around them were losing momentum in their faith.

The grumbling of the chief priests and teachers of the law about the noisy children is met with a response from Jesus that is a reminder of what they know all too well themselves from reading the Psalms–praise from the children is actually prescribed by God and is therefore made holy.

I’m reminded of this every Sunday when I play piano for the Sunday School singing time for about thirty children in our small church.  For over twenty years now I’ve watched a generation of Wiser Lake Chapel children, including my own three, grow up in that church basement, singing the same praise and worship songs from the time they sit as toddlers on a bigger sibling’s lap, to the point when they “graduate” to the high school class.  Some of those children have become the Sunday School teachers, with their own children sitting in the very chairs they sat in such a short time ago.  There is nothing more invigorating than hearing children singing energetically with joy, knowing that God Himself has ordained their voices should be lifted up in praise.

So on this sad and lonely week that marches inexorably to Friday, to Golgotha, to suffering and death, the unwelcome shouts and songs of the children must have been soothing balm to Jesus’ soul.  The children knew His heart when the adults around Him were too blind to see and too deaf to hear.