Lent and Longing

Desert, Igor Ulanovsky

The season of Lent can be a particularly trying time for those of us who are experiencing great sorrow.

It can also be a trying time for those of us who are looking inward – and outward – to contemplate what sacrifices, what alms, what prayers we might make, give, offer up, to relieve the injustices and exclusions of the world, including those within our own church.

We need some gravity like this in our lives, I suppose. But we also need a vision to sustain us. We need, always before us, the glow of all the Easters on the far horizon to show us where we are going and why we are taking such a profound journey.

I have a book of poems I love called “Blessing the Bread”. They are meditations by Lynn Ungar, a Unitarian Universalist minister. Here is just one which sustains me, and, I hope, you, too.

LENT

What will you give up for this season,

to help life along

in its curious reversals?

As if we had a choice.

As if the world were not

constantly shedding us

like feathers off a duck’s back-

the ground is always

littered with our longings.

You can’t help but wonder

about all the heroes,

the lives and limbs sacrificed

in their compulsion toward the good.

All those who dropped themselves

upon the earth’s hard surface-

weren’t they caught in pure astonishment

in the breath before they shattered?

Forget sacrifice. Nothing

is tied so firmly that the wind

won’t tear it from us at last.

The question is how to remain faithful

to all the impossible,

necessary resurrections.