Wednesday, March 9, 2011

Snow on Ash Wednesday

The word "Lent" comes from an Old English word that means springtime. And it's good to remember that on this Ash Wednesday morning as I look out my window...




...because I have been doing a lot of thinking lately about the difference between faith and belief and somehow I think there's a connection here. There's more to faith than trying to believe what we've been told we must believe. There's more to hoping for spring than being put off by the fact that it's still snowing. There's more to Lent than fasting.

I think faith has to do with what I know in my heart even if isn't in sync with what other people believe. It's what Richard Rohr means when he says "Your deepest intuition is real." No matter what anyone else may choose to believe about today's forecast when I look out the window I know in my heart that spring is already happening underneath all the snow that is filling up our back yard.



And so what on earth does this has to do with Lent? Quite a bit, I think, because there's more to it than what so many of us have always been led to believe we must do in order to observe it appropriately. Lent is a time to examine our priorities and take a closer look at where we spend our time and energy, as well as what we need to do (or not do) in order to nurture the spiritual side of who we are. The traditional approach of combining fasting, prayer and almsgiving can be one way of doing that - but only if we know in our hearts why we're doing it.

“…our self-imposed sacrifices are likely to be pretenses, symbolic gestures without real interior meaning," says Thomas Merton who obviously gave a great deal of thought to this very subject...



"Sacrifices made in this formalistic spirit," continues Merton, "tend to be mere acts of external routine performed in order to exorcise interior anxiety and our attention will tend to fix itself upon the insignificant suffering which we have piously elected to undergo, and to exaggerate it in one way or the other, either to make it seem unbearable or else to make it seem more heroic than it actually is. It would be more sincere as well as more religious to eat a full dinner in a spirit of gratitude than to make some picayune sacrifice of part of it, with the feeling that one is suffering martyrdom."

I'm thinking about Merton's words as I look out my window on this snowy March morning as Lent gets underway. Last year as summer was ending I brought in all my geraniums so I could keep them trimmed back and alive through the winter. Now, just as Lent begins, the cuttings I've taken are already thriving. By spring they'll be ready to plan outdoors.



This Lent I'll be doing some fasting, some alms-giving and some praying, just like I always do. But I'm also going keep my geraniums well watered and be grateful for what I carry in my heart - a sure and certain faith in spring.

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