We all know God is love. Life is how we come to know more fully, how to honor that reality, how to live as disciples of Divine Love. Hopefully it begins with examples from our family, from our home.
Lent is that season when we hopefully use the disciplines of prayer, almsgiving and sacrifice to pull back the distractions and excuses and substitutes we put in our lives for anything and all things other than God.
I have been trying to write but have been stopped by the need to sign cards, to find things, and to walk the dog. My brain wants to grumble, but these acts too, they are opportunities for showing love. They are service to others, which is what a disciple is called to do. Writing, though relaxing and reflective for me, is a form of prayer but it is also, more solitary in nature. Love always has an object –a person, a discipline, a team, a food, a hobby, a job, a family, a principle. Because God is love, and God made all, it’s easy for us to fall into love with the littler things, and stay there. But love, even more than the universe, is ever expanding outward to infinity.
When we love finitely, we stagnate. We stop writing or caring or doing. This is why for us, in our fallen nature, we cannot rely on feeling alone. We must will to cooperate when our wills would will otherwise. That is the gift of discipline, of fasting, of seeking to no longer to be mastered by our bodies, though we still will be. That Coke Zero keeps beckoning. It’s a stupid little thing to miss. It will be in my Easter Basket.
It’s the beginning of Holy Week. Our lives are the school through which we come to the point of imitating Martha and Mary, Simon and Veronica, and all the apostles –we will know in advance, we’re going to fail, but also that Jesus loves us still, and begin again. Our lives are always Lent, because we have not yet come into Easter fully. Our lives are also always about being more fully rendered an Easter people.
My daughter comes in to rant about a show she loves where a character gets killed off. “I wish I didn’t care about this. It’s stupid, it’s made up.” She added that a particular character didn’t learn anything from the suffering, from the struggle. The character apparently switched sides to be with the winners, not because of a conversion but because he saw his side losing. I pointed out, sometimes we go whole Lents without learning the lesson, whole lives. I was in writing mode. “Mom, I’m just rage ranting.” she said, and flounced out.
Lent, and all of life, is about discovering, sin is losing, sin has lost. We should switch sides even if we don’t yet feel it and haven’t yet come to understand fully why. We can’t understand why God is inviting us every moment, in all our distraction, to enter into an infinity of love. We can only know, that’s what Love, what God does, what Love, what God is, and hopefully, each of us knows just enough to say, “yes.”
Happy soon to be Easter. Have a great Holy Week!
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