THE EMPTINESS OF LENT

We are always building a house. It sounds strange, but if you really think about it, our lives are interior and exterior all at once. We lay a foundation, solid or weak as it is, and then we spend our lives constructing and deconstructing walls, doors, windows, and places of refuge inside and out; this is living, coping and sometimes thriving.

Lent may be about stripping away the candy on our gingerbread houses. We live from deep places, formed by the age of seven some say, and learn early how to decorate who we are to survive or please others or get by. How can we connect our spirituality with the person we have become? It might begin simply and small, by examining the external to give clues to our inner life. I must empty my linen closets and let my dirty laundry out to dry.

Perhaps your spiritual life is less messy than mine, thank God for that. For me, though, these forty days of fasting prove to expose all that is hidden under the light of emptiness. I can see what the closet is made of when I empty it's contents; likewise, God illumines who I truly am as I give up my comforts, distractions and hiding places.

As I cleared out my closet I was angry and frustrated that I had left it to the last minute, and here is my internal world colliding with the external. I can fast from purchasing and clutter and food, but more necessary may be the fast from wrath. Let us keep a holy Lent; holiness begs to be inward.

I want to be a pure, welcoming, loving home fit for a dwelling place for God as well as a comfort for  others.

Medicine from Sacred Writings:

"Make some change, and let the beginning of it be visible from this day. For if we spend the whole of the present fast with such zeal, having in this week attained the practice of not swearing at all; and in the following having extinguished wrath... having then pulled up evil-speaking by the roots; and after that, amended what yet remains, we shall come little by little to virtue."

John Chrysostom              Fourth Century