It was a wonderful blessing to be nestled in the Cascade mountains last week at Holden Village. Having this time just before entering Lent couldn’t have been more perfect. Here I was gathered with Laura and Berit in a spectacularly beautiful setting, living a very different rhythm of life.
I have heard about Holden Village since I was a college student, but I had never gone to experience this remote community surrounded by the majesty of God's creation. The snow frosted trees and subtle play of light and shadow on the mountains took my breath away. The structure of life in this beloved community breathed new life into my spirit. Each day I centered myself with a group of people who gathered to practice Tai Chi outside on the loading dock of the main lodge. The practice we were introduced to was Shibashi, 18 postures, a form of Tai Chi which was claimed by a group of Asian Christian women who were seeking to embrace their own heritage. They recognized that their Christian faith had oppressive colonial origins, and they were seeking to reclaim the ways that God's spirit had been woven into the fabric of their culture and history even before Christianity arrived on their shores. During my time at Holden, morning Shibashi became a beautiful body prayer. As we turned and moved and breathed the cold air with the mountains surrounding us and the trees occasionally anointing us with snow bombs, it was hard not to feel aligned with scripture’s proclamations of the trees and the mountains praising God. Each evening closed with “Sacred Space” - one night was Holden Evening Prayer, another was Mountain Vespers with the children of the village dancing wildly in the aisle (think Heehaw meets church), another night it was singing Taizé chants gathered around candles and prayer. Not everyone participated in these opportunities, but for me these rhythms reinforced a community that joined together for meals and for stacking wood, for cleaning the dishes and stoking the boilers… as guests we were welcome to share in a few of those activities.
This experience of living in beloved community is one of the things that I cherish about retreats, habitat, and canoe trips. They are moments when we have a chance to align our whole lives to living our faith in renewed ways. The season of Lent is intended to be a time of realigning our lives to God's ways. The word is simply rooted in the word “lengthening”. For those of us in the northern hemisphere our Lenten journey include celebrating ever more sunlight expanding into our lives, a perfect metaphor for preparation for Easter. The early church instituted the 40 days of Lent as parallel to the 40 days of preparation that Jesus went through in the wilderness, a marker of time that appears often throughout scripture as a season of preparation. I have always struggled with lent as being a time when people would heap on a little extra guilt and feel the weight of how much they needed to repent. This sense of claiming our brokenness only has theological validity if we first celebrate how completely God loves us, with no exceptions. The gloomy, burdensome guilt that can be central to Lent often squashes that reminder of original blessing. Increasingly, I find I am crying out as loudly and passionately as I can that our faith is not intended to be transactional but rather relational. We hear again and again that there is nothing that we can do to earn God's love, that it is freely offered. We celebrate the church as being the bearer of Grace, unmerited love and forgiveness. And yet, we get caught in a long history of “shoulding” on ourselves and others. Our whole journey of faith is an invitation to return to the love of God, so that this love might both transform us and others. The journey of Lent might more faithfully be lived as the turning back from the brokenness of our world and our lives and the ways that we may perpetuate or contribute to that brokenness, to turn back to the ways of God's extravagant love. What if we emphasized that choice with positive language instead of shoulding on ourselves and others?
For years I have sung Holden Evening Prayer last week someone lifted up that their favorite line from that service was the one in the Magnificat when the whole congregation sings Mary’s proclamation: “you have looked with love on your servant here, and blessed me all my life through.” As I lived with this sacred community for a week I was struck by how many of the people had been deeply hurt by the church. How a transactional faith had name them as not worthy or not welcome within the confines of their religious traditions. I started me thinking about the real work for us as people of faith during this season of Lent. And that work would be to recognize our belovedness to God. The same narrative that speaks of our being dust, dry soil, speaks of our being God-formed and loved and breathed into. And not just us but all of humanity. It strikes me that the most important work of the church in this moment is for us to do the work of allowing God's love to claim us fully – and then to let that love flow through us to be shared with all, not because anyone has earned it, or offered the right proclamation of faith or doctrine or creed, but because that how God loves!
What would it look like if instead of giving up something for lent, or feeling heavy laden, if we understood our call to repentance to be one of turning back to the love of God. If you want to put reminders in your life like not eating meat or foregoing chocolate, terrific, but use those markers as reminders to allow yourself to know how deeply you are loved and then to love. Could we let the Lenten journey be one of shedding our transactional theology in favor of a relational theology that draws us ever deeper to the spirit of God which has sought to take our breath away and to fill our spirits with new life since the beginnings of time?
For me, I will be trying to practice Shibashi each morning and remembering that different space of being in relationship with God, breathing in love and breathing out anything that would keep me from God's love. Is there some small way that each of us might redouble our efforts to live that extravagant love of God?
May God bless us on the journey,
Pastor Eric