Ash Wednesday 2019

One more day to serve.

One more hour to love.

One more minute to praise.

For this day I am grateful.

If I awaken to the morning sun,

I am grateful. 

Sister Mary Lou Kownacki, OSB

During Epiphany several of my sabbath day Lectio Divina words have been about containers and being filled.  At the same time, I have realised that what is not helping this winter’s bout of severe depression is the amount of mess surrounding me in my flat.  It seems that internal peace is harder for me to source when my external self is hedged around with ‘stuff’.

Lent is traditionally a period of penitential ‘giving up’, of renunciation and privation; a return, or at least a turning, to a time of simplicity.  And yet I suspect that I need to do more than ‘give up’ something for forty days if I’m going to find a route through this current physical and psychological clutter.

I feel God is urging me to give.

Yes, urging me to give ‘away’ books and cds and pictures and objects and clothes and plants, to make room in cupboards and on shelves for art materials currently found in teetering piles performing their starring roles of ‘trip hazards’ on the floor with such brilliance.  But more, urging me to give what I’ve made, drawn, painted, printed, written, photographed - and give freely, without fear of rejection or ridicule.

But more, urging me to give all of me.

For God is longing for my flourishing; and is longing for the Grace I have been given in abundance to overflow to others.

Yes, I may well find this overwhelming; but shouldn’t the ‘too-muchness’ of the Creator be overwhelming?  If not, there’s something extraordinarily skewed and misguided about my view of my God.

Will I make space to listen to where and what God might want me to give? ’Teach us to sit still/ Even among these rocks,/ Our peace in His will’ is part of T.S. Eliot’s Ash Wednesday poem/prayer.  Whatever the rocks, am I willing to wait amongst them if in doing so I might behold my God?  Here, now, today is the time to ‘give it time’.

Whatever my fears, and even though I have often allowed them to block me and stall me in my puny attempts to control them, God continues to invite me to begin again on our adventure.  Here, now, today, this is the time to ‘give in’.  

Whatever the state of my health, I need go nowhere, and produce nothing.  Here, now, today is the time to ‘give up’, even this breath, even this confused prayer; the time to ‘let all my strivings cease’.

Whatever my feelings that I've come to the 'end of myself’ and I have no spare energy left for others, will I remember: I already have more than enough, have already done enough, I am already am enough?  Here, now, today, this is the time to find specific opportunities to ‘give away’ what is needed from me, to the right person, at the right moment.

I pray this Lent may be a time where I engage with the economy of Grace: getting creative with all of myself and all I have been given; ‘giving out’ so as to make room to be filled in again.

Each one of us is called to become that great song that comes out of the silence, and the more we let ourselves down into that great silence the more we become capable of singing that great song.

~ Br. David Steindl-Rast

open your present. Canon 7D. f8. 1/200. ISO 200.