Thoughts from St. Andrew's Episcopal Church • Birmingham, AL

Introduction

“Eternal Lord of love, behold your Church walking once more the pilgrim way of Lent.” Old 124th

Once more we are walking the pathway of Lent. This is a time to refocus and re-examine our hearts, spirits, and minds. A time to recall our secular New Year’s resolutions and recollect our thoughts about our spiritual practices — mainly to question what needs to be changed, added, or continued, so that we draw closer to Jesus Christ. As Father Richard Rohr posits, “We are not so much human beings trying to become spiritual. We are already inherently spiritual beings and our job is learning how to be good humans!” One route to becoming truly human is to examine all of who we are believed to be: good and bad, positive and negative, clean and unclean, and dark and light. I am convinced that becoming “perfect” really means learning to live in balance with all of who we are and all of who we are becoming. This is the season during which we can incorporate a spiritual practice that affords us the opportunity to become exceptionally exposed.  We give up invincibility and security in exchange for the ritual of diligently abstaining from whatever agent we believe hinders our reliance on God.

Lent invites us into becoming good people, whole persons. When we are made to refocus on the basics, the mundane, the seemingly insignificant, and the overlooked within ourselves, we are transformed. This is accomplished by giving up objects, actions, and beliefs that prohibit and prevent the love and grace of God to permeate our souls. 

We are empowered to practice a “Lenten Fast,” by turning our focus from worry, fear, anxiety, hate, and disappointment, and turning to humility, forgiveness, gratitude, laughter, love, and acceptance. We stop practicing racism, classism, sexism, and exclusionism, and we refrain from pointing fingers, blaming, and pursing our self-centered wills. Perhaps that is what metanoia, or repentance is all about. Turning our will and eyes from judgement of one another to love and tolerance of one another.

The Season of Lent presents us with a new type of fasting, one that God initiates and appears to practice in perpetuity. The Eternal Lord of Love invites us to become more cognizant and conscious of God’s ubiquitous love for all humankind, which is exemplified by the Christian values of equality and equity. God makes clear that material things need not be so much the focus of our abstinence, but rather the innate, internal manifestations of “isms” that block God out of our lives, and prevent and pervert our carrying out justice.

This sort of fast articulated by Jesus produces fruit. God is particularly interested in loosening, undoing, breaking, sharing, housing, covering, exposing, enlightening, healing, vindicating, and glorifying all of us! We respond to this penetrating love by fully embracing our humanity and allowing the Holy Spirit to fully embrace us —  and animate us and our consciousness.

Let us fully and completely go forward “in the name of the Church, to the observance of a holy Lent, by self-examination and repentance...” to embrace our humanity and spirituality.

The Reverend Dr. Tommie L. Watkins, Jr.