The Wonders of Lent

It is very easy in the midst of personal pressures and private confusions, of public stress and social challenge, to forget the wonders God has done for us. God often performs these marvels when we are least hopeful they will happen, least sure they can happen.

Out of death, after pain diminishes and numbness fades, new life so often comes forth. After the loss of one direction, another more vibrant than the first so often emerges. Beyond what the world says are our best years, comes a fullness of life unmatched by any other stage.

These are the miracles of life. These are the wonders we stumble into, so obviously not of our own making that they must be of God. These are the things that must be remembered in the midst of the daily, dull, depressing moments of life.

Good has so often come out of even more shabby parts of our own life. We retreat from religion because it disappoints only to find no better answers elsewhere and return more spiritual than ever before. We fail ourselves miserably, then find new life when we discover that people loved us for ourselves, not our images. We get stopped in our indulgent, dishonest, ambitious, shiftless tracks and become newer better ourselves. These are the wonders of life.

It is a wholesome part of Lent, then, to remember where God has been faithful and we have strayed, how God has loved us even when we have been least lovable, least aware, least immersed in the mind of God. We need to rehearse in our hearts that it was often in darkness that God was clearest to us. For without memory, hope dies.

The creation of the Covenant did not end the struggles Israel had to face. It simply confirmed the fact that whatever fray they faced, they would not be alone.

Our own lives take the same pattern. Every life is filled with a series of small miracles designed to carry us through dark days, up steep mountains, down into the valley of death, beyond every spiritual boundary.

One of the spiritual disciplines of Lent is to recognize these, to let praise raise in our hearts. We need to see the miracles of our lives as signs along the way that no path is too twisted, no burden so heavy, no social system so impenetrable as to confound us utterly. The God who has sustained us in the past will not desert us in the present.

Praise and memory take us into tomorrow with open minds and certain hearts.

by Joan Chittister