Coraggio!

I entered this Lenten season feeling in need of a teacher. In this culture of multiple blogs and connections, (to which I am contributing), it was hard to sort through all the offerings in front of me to light on ONE where I might focus for this journey. I pulled a book written in 1988 by Janet Morley, from the United Kingdom, that I bought in England in the ’90s, off my shelf.  Morley worked professionally for Christian Aid and then for the Methodist Church in the U.K., and now is is a free lance lecturer and writer. This book, All Desires Known, is in its third printing and continues to be a valuable liturgical source in the Church. When I reached for it, I remembered that her prayers and poems had been life-giving, comforting and challenging for me each time I had read and prayed them. In this book she has a series of short collects for Lent, one for each week, and I have chosen them to be my teacher this Lent.

Lent 1        Matthew 4: 1-11

Spirit of integrity/you drive us into the desert/to search out our truth./Give us clarity to know what it right, and courage to reject what is strategic;/that we may abandon the false innocence of failing to choose at all,/ but may follow the purposes of Jesus Christ. Amen

I confess that I don’t feel very brave. I am never the one who leaps at a chance to right the wrong, stand up in a crowd or  start a revolution. Sometimes I am even too timid to ask the sales person for help, or tell someone that they have hurt me. Yet the Lenten desert  demands courage, just to stay there. What is before me that requires courage? My Lenten practice this year is to enact each day something that makes for peace. How can one small contribution such as mine make a difference in the places that are shredded by conflict, ill-will and violence? Yet in this week ahead, I am called to discern where to offer my gift of peacemaking. It doesn’t take much courage for me to send a small financial contribution to those agencies and ministries who are on the front lines of peace-making, but I do need clarity to know which one compels my gifts and prayers this very day. It doesn’t even demand much courage to sign a petition sent to the President or my congresswoman to register my convictions about making peace a priority; it takes clarity, however, to come to know my own heart and soul, to put them into words that are effective.

Closer to home, there are opportunities for being and speaking peace that are more challenging. My denomination is battered and tattered, as are most of the other mainline denominations, as is the nation, not only from the essential disagreement of the shape of life as  community when resources are scarce and inequitably distributed, but from the ranting and cruel words and phrases that are used to debate the differences. I am trying to discover how I can be a maker of peace: I need clarity to know, not only the vocabulary and syntax that speak peace, but when and where to deliver them. To whom shall I write? With whom shall I initiate a conversation? And do I have the courage to speak my truth in such a way that there is a “harvest of righteousness sown in peace for those who make peace.” (James 3:13)

Of course, there are the daily rounds: marketing, neighborhood, friends and family. The desert can be found even there– cubbyholes of grief, bedsides of illness, standoffs of alienation, all in need of the peace of Christ. Which one has my name on it? can I see and hear it clearly with the direction  of the Spirit? and will I have the courage to speak the truth in love, a truth of gentleness, of perception of hope.

May the Holy One give me clarity and courage in this desert pilgrimage of Lent!