Fr Robert Hendrickson
Dear Friends in Christ,
The past week has been…full.
Given the realities of the new administration’s shift in research priorities, healthcare financial strains, and potential changes to the economics of Medicaid and Medicare, Karrie’s medical research position was eliminated.
On top of that both boys chose to get strep throat. This was a week when we were supposed to be traveling to La Jolla for a bit of surfing recreation and I was going to represent the parish at Fr Roger Douglas’ funeral Saturday (yesterday).
Life caught up with us. As it does for all of us sometimes. We all have weeks or months or seasons or seemingly years when the realities of the day outpace our plans.
So rather than a week away surfing I tried to find a couple of hours doing something mindlessly intentional.
So my yard beckoned. I needed to move a basketball goal. I needed to trim some trees. I needed to dig some holes for new plants. I needed to pull out some dead ones. I needed to tear out some weeds. I needed to move some piles of old books from one corner to another.
I needed to do some things. Sometimes we all need to do some things to distract from some other things.
But sometimes we need to go deeper into the things. Sometimes we just need to sit with reality and let it do its thing so we can become more real.
This is the call of Lent. We need to let its reality make us more real.
The movement toward Jerusalem is not a distraction from the beauty of Heaven—it’s an invitation to the road that leads us there.
The suffering of Christ is not a byproduct of an evolutionary process. It is the process.
The suffering of this life is a path toward a deeper and more outwardly focused humanity. Through the challenges of this life we remember the short awkwardness of its beauty.
We are reminded that our very well drawn, highly narrated stories will not be the actual stories of our lives. They will take sudden turns and dramatic shifts that will be the story themselves.
We will find ourselves defined not by the turns but by how we turn. Lent is the process of turning. It is the process of turning toward God.
A literal manifestation of this is seen at the Easter Vigil. In that pivotal liturgy, the fulcrum of the Christian year, the priest asks those preparing for Baptism if they will turn to Christ and accept him as their Savior. Then those who will be baptized, literally turn from facing away from the congregation to facing toward them and answer that they will.
Lent is the literally turning toward Christ. It is turning into the challenges of living faithfully and following humbly. It is turning toward the daily call to take up our cross. It is turning toward the small ways we resist the temptation to despair and dejection toward the eternal hope offered to us all.
The challenge of Lent is not to pretend that we are above the worries and hurts of the world but to turn into them. That is how we follow Christ.
We all may need to make space to plant something new, to dig up that which is dead, and to nurture that which is ailing. That is Lent. We do what is needed so that new life may flourish even while we might mourn that which is passing away.
New life is around the corner. Toward that we turn this Lent.
Yours in Christ,
—Fr Robert
