An Upside Down Map and a Broken Compass
First Sunday of Lent - Year A
Sunday, February 10, 2008
First Sunday of Lent - Year A
Sunday, February 10, 2008
Let us pray: O God, you guided the choices Jesus made in the wilderness, helping him to get ready for his journey of teaching and healing, helping him to avoid the temptations that fame and power dangled before him. May you also guide the choices we make in the many types of wilderness we encounter, and may you guide the words that I speak today. Amen.
These are the words that I used to end my reflection last week. “I invite us to move from the mountain into the valley of Lent - not some dark place - just the place of everyday living - for it too is infused by the presence of God - perhaps not with the mystical experiences that bring us into thin air, and not the events and occurrences that lead us to set up memorial cairns or brass plaques - but just the regular rhythm of lives guided by our faith in God, and God’s faith in us.”
Those words guided my thinking as we moved this week into the season of Lent. I have to admit that my independent nature has always chafed a bit at the imposed mood that comes from following the Christian calendar. What if I’m not ready to enter into a penitential frame of mind? This sense is not aided by the fact that because Easter is a movable feast - so also is Lent. Perhaps it might be easier if the beginning of Lent, like Christmas, always fell on the same day in the year - but it doesn’t. There might be something to the rhythm of the year if we could count on expecting to have a certain spiritual mindset and heartset when a certain day came around on the calendar. But sometimes the season of Epiphany goes on and on, and sometimes like this year, we had a very short season after Epiphany. In fact, I checked and the earliest Easter that has occurred or will occur in the four centuries that surround us is only one day earlier than this year, but the latest that Easter has occurred or will occur is over a month later.
So, on one hand, there is a reluctance on my part to be guided to feel and be a certain way, in a rhythm that is so difficult to calculate that in one implementation I consulted, it takes thirty-three lines of computer code. On the other hand, I am challenged to relent a bit of my independence and follow this ancient tradition. There is value in walking with the practices and letting them speak to my soul as they have for countless other people in the Christian faith who have gone before me.
I was reflecting on this tension last night in one of my several wakeful moments. I thought of the practice that some people follow in the season of Lent - not of giving something up for Lent, but instead of taking something on for Lent - adding, rather than subtracting - choosing to do something more or different, instead of going without. Either way - giving up or adding on - it’s often called a Lenten discipline. Discipline - that word that conjures up so many negative feelings for this son of two school teachers - a father who was vice principal and therefore was required in his position to deal with all the difficult discipline problems, a role that disturbed his gentle nature so much that he went back to teaching where the requirements for discipline were less challenging.
So, the chafing I described by having a particular mood or feeling prescribed for me by the turning of the Christian season is not helped by my adverse reaction to the naming of the practice as a discipline. At least it wasn’t until my mind jumped to the similar rooted word - disciple. Realising that discipline and disciple are related redeems the word for me.
It may seem that a Lenten discipline is about engaging in a certain practice over and over again. Sometimes this practice is lived out in acts of charity. I discovered a Lenten calendar this week on the web site of The United Church of Canada that leads us to reflect on the privilege we experience in our lives as wealthy North Americans and the disparity between our lives and the lives of others. The calendar challenges us to contribute toward church and community projects as a Lenten discipline. You can find it by putting “lenten calendar” into the search feature on the main web site of the church: united-church.ca and you will probably want to do somet thinking about how to modify it to fit our local context. So, yes, a Lenten discipline is a repeated practice or a voluntary fast from something that we normally like to do, but it is also disruptive activity - we practice it during the forty days of Lent, but it ends at Easter. It is repeated for a while - creating its own rhythm and then it ends - thus disturbing the rhythm of the others days of the year. And we can’t even rely on this disruption happening at the same time every year, and so the rhythm is even further disturbed.
And so it’s not about me and the challenge it presents for my independent nature - it’s about the challenge of being a disciple - and time has proven that a Lenten discipline has a role to play in that quest. As I said when the children were gathered here a little while ago - it is a sad but true fact that we sometimes learn best by making mistakes. We also learn through practice, and we learn by being able to make connections that seem outside of logical associations. How many stories of great scientific discoveries tell of a connection that was outside of expected outcomes or because of an observed side effect? It takes “outside of the box” kinds of thinking sometimes for fresh insight to happen. It takes a disruption in our patterns of living to come to new visions of what it means to live faithfully.
Who among us would start out on an unfamiliar journey with the equivalent of a map that is impossible to read and a compass that won’t tell us where we are going and in what direction? And yet, it is just that kind of situation which guides our Lenten journey. We are challenged to discover new ways of thinking. We are encouraged to reflect on the path we’ve travelled and use new guidance systems to determine where we will go from here.
What does this all mean for me and for us? I believe it means setting out on the journey with an open heart and an open mind. We don’t know from where new ideas will come? We don’t know how our journey will be altered by insights from other faith traditions. We don’t know how a repeated discipline coupled with the reflection that discipline inspires will change our path. We don’t really know where the journey will lead us, and more importantly what experiences we will encounter along the way. What if we burn the useless map and pocket the broken compass and let the inukshuk guide us instead? Let’s see....Amen.