Lent
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When night becomes day
Here’s a game that might make your Lent a little more interesting. It’s called “Purgatory,” named for the waiting room where, some Christians believe, your sins are purged and your soul is purified before entering heaven. The way the game’s inventor imagined it, people with contradictory views of life would be paired with each other Continue reading
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Remember who you are
“How often I have desired to gather your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you were not willing” (Luke 13:34)! Traditionally during Lent, we share vicariously in Jesus’ forty days of being tested in the wilderness to see what he was made of and who he would be. But Continue reading
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In the wilderness
One of the good jokes I like to tell is memorable for two reasons: it tells a story, and it’s about sudden and unexpected change. Few things are as painful as great and sudden change, so a good way to cope is to tell a joke about it. And the more painful the change, the Continue reading
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Reframing Lent
It’s time to reframe the season of Lent. The way we usually define it is not wrong, if you hold the traditional Latin view of God as an “original sin” kind of god who holds loving grace in one hand while holding punishment and rejection in the other – the hope of heaven and the Continue reading
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Another cup of coffee
“For what it’s worth,” F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote, “it’s never too late . . . to be whoever you want to be. There’s no time limit, stop whenever you want. You can change or stay the same, there are no rules to this thing. We can make the best or the worst of it. I Continue reading
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Three Rs for today
Yet even now, says the Lord, return to me with all your heart. (Joel 2:12a) Seldom has a question caught my attention as suddenly and completely as the one I overheard on a busy street in Manhattan forty years ago. I had spent the day in Midtown and was headed to catch a bus for Continue reading
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The way to life
We don’t observe the season of Lent to seek redemption from our broken nature; that’s already been accomplished. And we don’t observe Lent to practice some stricter rules for Christian life; authentic Christianity is not about following any rules. We observe Lent because we want the experience of being fully alive and fully human.1 We Continue reading
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When night ends and day begins
There’s a game that might make your Lent a little more interesting; it does mine. It’s called “Purgatory,” named for the waiting room where, some Christians believe, your sins are purged and your soul is purified before entering heaven. The way poet W.H. Auden invented the game, writers with contradictory views of life would be Continue reading
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Walk in gift today
The season of Lent, as I first learned about it, was a sack-cloth-and-ashes season when we church people felt sorry, maybe even ashamed, for how we had been living and the bad things we had done; we repented and tried to get back into God’s good graces; and we deprived ourselves of something we liked Continue reading
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Shutting the door
“Anyone can retire into a quiet place, wrote Evelyn Underhill, but it’s the shutting of the door that makes the difference. Solitude is a time for stripping away everything in order to focus on God. (Matt 6:6)” (Sue Monk Kidd). Lent is not far away, beginning in just under three weeks with Ash Wednesday on Continue reading
The Sauntering Pilgrim 