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.

A Garden Story (Trisha)

When we moved into our home in 1990, the house next to us had yet to be built. There was nothing there except an empty lot. But there was a beautiful garden on ours – or at least we thought it was on our lot. The people from whom we bought our house were a little hazy about where exactly the lot line was located but they assured us that if any of the garden had spilled over onto the other lot, it couldn’t have been more than a few inches. So I happily tended to the garden, adding new plants from time to time, carefully keeping the weeds in check, enjoying the fun of watching beautiful things grow and bloom.

When the lot was sold and the new house was built, we explained to the first owners about the garden and they could see no reason not to keep it that way – especially since from their new house they had a better view of it than we did. When they moved away and the second family moved in we went through the same explanation and received the same response. No problem, they said, the garden is gorgeous, why would we want you to move it? Which brings me to the present owners.

Shortly after they moved in, we repeated the story about how part of our garden had ended up on their property and asked them if it would be a problem. Oh no, not at all was their reply. But that was last fall when they moved in. In the meantime something must have happened to change their minds. Because by the spring it suddenly had become a problem. A very big problem. The first hint came when we looked out the window and noticed our neighbor was having his property surveyed to establish the exact location of the lot line. And as it turned out, there were more than just a few inches of our garden on his property. Almost half of it was. We had been misinformed 20 years ago when we bought our home. And our new neighbor was of the opinion that we had deliberately misinformed him when he bought his. Overnight he became belligerent and confrontational, accusing us of deliberately misleading him, letting us know that we were guilty of trespassing and he wasn’t going to stand for it. In fact he was giving us one week to move our garden to a new spot. At the end of that week, he would personally dig out by the roots and destroy anything that remained on his property.

One week to contact a landscaper who could help us prepare another spot on our property to use for a new garden. One week to carefully transplant the many shrubs and perennials I had nurtured over the years. Meanwhile our neighbor had pounded metal boundary markers along the property line and strung a long length of bright orange cord between them, lest anyone be in doubt about which side belonged to whom.



Now it must be mentioned that we are not the kind of people who immediately shout “Sue the bastard” when something like this comes up. Nonetheless I have to admit that we did contact a lawyer and were told that if we chose to fight, most likely we would win. But by the time we considered the cost of legal fees and the tremendous amount of negative energy that would be spent in the process it just didn’t seem worth it. Far better to spend the money on something positive – like a brand new garden and so that’s what we did. Our not-so-nice neighbor calmed down a bit when we informed him that we had contracted a landscaper who was willing to begin work immediately. And so to make a long story short, within a month the old garden was gone and our back yard had been transformed. We planted a row of arbor vitae just inside the property line leaving no doubt about which side is ours, and creating a sense of privacy (since our neighbor has turned out to be someone from whom we prefer to keep our distance.) Thanks to the landscaper the ground has been shaped and contoured so that the garden no longer is confined to a flat and rather boring rectangular area. Instead it curves and climbs and meanders along almost the whole length of our back yard. It’s a good example of the fact that what often seems like a disaster at the time can turn out to be just the opposite. Or as Garrison Keillor once said “Some luck lies in not getting what you thought you wanted but getting what you have, which once you have got it you may be smart enough to see is what you would have wanted had you known.”