Peter Helman

As he was setting out on a journey, a man ran up and knelt before him, and asked him, “Rabbi, what must I do to inherit eternal life?” (Mark 10:17) 
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Dear friends,

In a few short weeks we’ll set out as a community gathered in love on a season of 40 days shaped by the virtues of penitence, mercy, and self-offering. The pilgrimage of Lent will drive us into the wilderness. We’ll trace the way of the Hebrew people who once wandered from exile in Egypt towards Canaan, the land they were promised. And we’ll follow at a distance as Jesus goes into the far country of the Judean desert, where he fasts for 40 days and nights and is tempted by the Satan.

Our beginning will be a strange mingling of hope and despair, of darkness and light—a luminous sorrow. We will see how much we belong to the unceasing love of God, how much we bear the ineffable beauty of God's likeness, but how much we've obscured that image and wandered far away. The repentance and contrition of Lent will be, above everything else, a desperate call for divine help as we strive to return to God who is our only home.

If we are to pass through the desert of Lent and prepare with joy for the days of our Lord’s passion and resurrection, what questions are there for us to pray on our pilgrimage home? Here are two that might take a lifetime to unpack:

Food and drink are means of life. They keep us alive. But what does it mean to be alive, and what does “life” mean?

Each of us has been made responsible for at least a tiny part of the kingdom of heaven, made responsible for the gift of Christ’s love. What part of the kingdom have you been given to tend?

As we set out on the journey, here too is a worthy question, that of the man who knelt before Jesus in our reading from Mark’s gospel today: “…what must I do to inherit eternal life?”

And with that question in mind, I can’t help but share with you this quote from something the 100th
Archbishop of Canterbury Michael Ramsey once wrote:

“The goal of the relationship between you and God and God and you is ‘heaven.’ I want to suggest that you do not think about heaven as much and as often as you ought to. […] Because heaven is not a sort of very, very far away, sort of last chapter of Christianity that we need not start bothering about quite just yet. No, heaven is the meaning of it all. Heaven is simply the coming perfection of that fellowship between you and God who made you, a God who loves you infinitely, a God who loves you so much that he cannot live a day without you, and who wants you with him everlastingly.” 

Beloved, peace be with you today and always,

—Peter+