Spiritual Reflection
Lent: A View Beyond Ourselves
By Canon Allisyn Thomas
I recently spoke on the phone with a classmate from seminary who is now serving in the Diocese of Mississippi, and during the course of our conversation she told me about the devastation the state is still experiencing in the wake of last year’s horrific hurricane season. The diocese lost six churches, and innumerable parishioners lost loved ones, their homes, and businesses. As we were talking I was looking out over Balboa Park from the window in my office. It was a warm and sunny day and the park seemed particularly peaceful. This bucolic scene was interrupted rather jarringly when a man on crutches, who appeared to be homeless, came into view and began rummaging through trashcans.
The contrast between sitting in my comfortable office overlooking Balboa Park and hearing about and seeing great human need could not have been more pronounced. Indeed it stayed with me as I sat down later to write this piece for the eClarion. It is often too easy to become inured to the suffering around us, especially if our own circumstances are relatively comfortable.
We are about to enter the season of Lent, the time in the church year in which we prepare for the coming of Easter and with it the paradoxes of the cross and the resurrection; of temporal death and everlasting life. It is a time of reflection and repentance. However, while the season does invite us to look inward at our own spiritual growth and relationship with God, that is far from the sole purpose of such reflection and repentance. In an article entitled, “Our Work in These Days,” Presiding Bishop Frank Griswold captures this point beautifully, “Lent is a season of repentance, and repentance – as Archbishop William Temple once defined it – is seeing things from God’s perspective rather than our own. To repent, then, is a radical act, when the dominant tone these days seems to indicate that our primary concern should be for our own immediate interests. God’s view is always larger than our own.”1.
Much is made during Lent of what it is we give up, or perhaps take on, such as saying additional prayers, in order to be made right with God—what many of us call our Lenten discipline. But the real value of any Lenten discipline is not the act itself but the extent to which it points us towards God and reminds us of what it means to be a person of faith in the world God created. It is not about helping us discover our personal shortcomings for their own sake and it is not about perfection but rather about helping us to accept, in the words of Bishop Griswold, that God’s view is always larger than our own, as well as its corollary, that God’s world, of which we are a part, is always larger than our own.
Of course this means that there will be sunny days when we see or hear things we’d rather not. But instead of dismissing them or pretending they are not there because they make us feel uncomfortable, burdened or just plain inadequate, we can ask God for help and guidance about what it is we should do. And when we do fall short, pray for the courage to be honest about it and the willingness to repent, knowing all the while that we are not being condemned but rather being pulled further into the life we were created to have by the grace of our loving God.
1. Frank Griswold, “Our Work in These Days”
