Lent Week One ~ Quotes for the Soul

 

The hardest spiritual work in the world is to love the neighbor as the self – to encounter another human being not as someone you can use, change, fix, help, save, enroll, convince or control, but simply as someone who can spring you from the prison of yourself, if you will allow it.  Rev. Barbara Brown Taylor

 

During the season of Lent, I want us to lean in and listen to the wisdom of preachers who continue to inspire, inform, challenge, and change me.  This week, we will meditate and ruminate and let the wisdom of Rev. Barbara Brown Taylor sing to our souls.  Barbara Brown Taylor is an Episcopal priest who served congregations in GA until she was called to join the faculty of Piedmont College (a UCC-founded college).  Over the course of her teaching, she has written numerous books, spoken at hundreds of conferences, but her favorite gig (according to her website) is being a full-time caretaker of a farm in the foothills of the Appalachians, where she lives with her husband, Ed, and many animals. 

 

Each day, when I offer a quote from Rev. Taylor, I invite you to engage in sacred reading.  Take a deep breath with me and slowly exhale. 

 

First, read the quote above, and notice/name your response.  Let it tickle your imagination, let it roam around your heart, let the syllables of the sentences stumble around your soul.  Pay attention to your response to the quote.  Does the quote make you smile or feel like sandpaper to your soul?  Does the quote evoke or provoke a passionate reaction, or taste like bland bread without any salt?  Sit with the quote over a cup of tea/coffee for a few minutes.

 

Second, re-read the quote, this time letting the intent of the words intersect your life.  For example, with the quote above, think about the other featherless bipeds you interacted with last week.  Did you try to use, change, fix, help, save, convince, or control?  I know I did.  How might someone that I meet today free me from the prison of myself?  What does that look like?  Pro tip: You may want to imagine a friend freeing you from the prison of yourself first, because immediately jumping to that person who makes your blood boil.  Just a thought.

 

Third, re-read the quote, and sit silently with the wisdom without trying to wrestle a meaning or a blessing.  As Rabbi Heschel once said, “Words create worlds.”  Enter the world of this quote with a curiosity and an openness that shape you.

 

Finally, consider how the world of these words could inform and inspire your living today and this week?  Try to set a practice to embrace and embody these words at a specific time and place today.

 

May the wisdom of fellow travelers on the road of faith give us strength during this season of Lent and during these wilderness-wander wayless way days.  Amen.  

Fast...Feast

 

Blessing

 

On this second day of Lent, how is it with your soul?  Honestly.  Are you sensing the sacred stirring, or does the Divine feel distant/disconnected?  Do you feel grounded or awash in a sea of negative news cycle?  Does your back ache and soul break from all you are carrying?  Let me offer a blessing to you on this day:

 

Blessed are you who are weary from racing around trying to do it all.

Blessed are you who feel worn down by trying to show up at all the events.

Blessed are you when you fall into bed at night, exhausted and wake up the next morning feeling behind.

Blessed are you when you yell, “Stop” to the planet, to the schedule demands, to trying to save the world, because you realize your cape has too many holes to support you when you fly.

Blessed are you when you sit in silence and pray, “Help”. 

Help us, O God, this Lent to find a gentleness with ourselves.  Help us remember that this is the first time I have been this age at this point in history, facing these events.  Who says I should be further along?  And further than what?!?  What is the measuring stick?

Help me, O God, remember this yoke isn’t mine alone.  You, O God, are a dancing Trinity of relationship, and You create/craft/carve into us a craving for connection.

Help us remember that our soul finds rest when we let go of outcomes.

Thank you for the friend who calls or I can text today.

Thank you for a burden I can set down today, trusting God, You can carry this.

Thank you for this earthy body that is trying to tell me that You don’t demand more, but for me to be/rest/reside in belovedness.

Let Your wisdom guide me, O God, as I face this day and interact with other featherless bipeds who are also carrying their backpacks that I know nothing about.

May Your holy yoke today be a support I need to face the unknow-ness of this moment.  Amen.

Dust

 

I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls.  Matthew 11:29

 

On this day, ashes are placed on your forehead.  Words are spoken over you, “From dust you are, to dust you shall return.”  As a death-denying culture, we don’t want to think about our death and demise.  We don’t want to consider the fact of our frail, fragile, finite lives will one day cease.  We will live forever with cold plunges and Keto diets and whatever else the market sells us to promise us our best life now. 

 

The church doesn’t do that.  “From dust you are, to dust you shall return.”  You, me, and we were crafted from the soil and stardust of creation.  We are earthlings, dust-beings, connecting the soil to our souls to the soil beneath our feet.  Up from the ground God raises a people again and again ~ connecting us in creative ways (see yesterday’s meditation about the yoke).  And one day, we return to the good earth that has nourished us so that we might nourish others.  We return to that which has supported us, so that we might support those who trudge this earth after. 

 

When Jesus says he is humble, the word is humility or humus or earth.  When theologian Steve Cuss invites us to be “human-size,” it reminds me that I don’t have to have it all figured out.  I won’t ever have it all figured out.  I don’t need an opinion on everything that is neatly arranged and artistically presented.  I, like the earth, am in process/evolving/exploring.  The earth has billions of organisms living in a teaspoon of soil.   The earth is constantly shifting and stirring, changing right before our eyes.

 

The word, gentle reminds me that I can either hurt and harm or help and heal.  Jesus’ yoke doesn’t demand and decree, like Caesar, but invites us to be infused with another realm.  God’s realm, that we pray for every Sunday and sing about in the Lord’s Prayer during Lent, calls us to reorient our hearts and lives to the One who is gentle and humble.  If this is the center and core of Jesus’ teaching, if this is the yoke we are called to take up with Christ helping and holding us, how might that shape you in the coming days?  May that question bless you as we move deeper into these forty days letting Christ be at the heart of all we seek to be, do, and live in these days.  Amen.

What Are You Yoked To??

 

²⁸ “Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest. ²⁹ Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. ³⁰ For my yoke is easy and my burden is light.”  Matthew 11:28-30

 

Yesterday, we prayerfully pondered, what are we carrying that we need to set down?  Often, I carry the thought that I need to be all things to all people (even though my defense attorney correctly points out that this is impossible!  I still think, but maybe I should still try, just in case).  I can carry people's words that feel like a thousand paper cuts to my soul.  I carry responsibility and accountability around because I think someone must do this!  I carry around the idea that it is all up to me, even though God’s presence in my life reminds me that I am not in charge or control of the world.  I hope you will consider what you are carrying as we reach the midpoint of the second month of 2026.  This is never a one-and-done activity, but a daily practice of paying attention to the backpacks we all lug around with us and that people add stuff into, often without asking permission first.

 

Jesus says that he will give us a “yoke”.  This is one of those wonderful images in scripture.  A yoke was a tactile, tangible tool ~ a wooden beam that sometimes connected oxen or other animals to work together when pulling a load.  Pause.  Notice that a yoke is NOT a tool for you to go solo through life.  Theologically, Jesus is saying, there is no such thing as an individual Christian.  A yoke connects you to God, people who long to lend a hand, and the fact that we are not alone.  A yoke can also be something that binds, confines, and burdens us.  Oxen didn’t get to vote whether or not they wanted to wear a yoke.  In this meaning, a yoke wasn’t only something that helped, but also hindered.  Sometimes people plop their problems into our lap and expect us to fix it, after all, aren’t Christians supposed to be known by their love?  Paul in Galatians 5 talked about a yoke of slavery.  We can become enslaved to political ideology, religious beliefs, our own biases, addictions to substances, shopping, or technology. 

 

One final meaning of a yoke was a religious teaching.  In this case, a rabbi or pastor would give you an understanding, and to follow/live this understanding meant you took upon yourself the rabbi’s yoke.  Still to this day, some pastors' teachings are heavy.  You must color inside their lines, affirm that set of dogma they espouse, do whatever the elders say or risk being exiled from the island of that church.  Jesus describes his yoke as a release from what is weighing us down.  Church isn’t the place for more messages about not being enough, but about being beloved.  Church isn’t the place for more “thou shall nots”, but could be a space of releasing our resistance and reluctance.   And because the church is made up of people (remember we started the year with 1 Corinthians 13, the church that was fighting about everything!), we will always need to be honest about the fact that we make mistakes and mess up.  We don’t have to carry our brokenness and boneheadedness alone.  Jesus invites us to bring that to him.

 

What has the church taught you that felt heavy?

When has the church offered you the chance to set down that which was breaking your back to keep lugging around?

Is there some understanding, belief, doctrine, dogma that is hurting you that God might be calling you to set aside this Lent ~ knowing that you can always pick it up again later if needed.

 

May these questions cause you to consider ways you can enter Lent this year open to Jesus’ care and love for you.  Amen.

Release

 

²⁸ “Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest. ²⁹ Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. ³⁰ For my yoke is easy and my burden is light.”  Matthew 11:28-30

 

This week, we begin the season of Lent with Ash Wednesday.  Lent is a time set aside for prayer, fasting (not only from food, but anything that can disconnect/distance us from the Divine ~ anything that demands our allegiance and promises to make us whole, but leaves us feeling empty).  During Lent, we focus on God’s holy presence.  Lent is tethered and tied to Advent.  God’s work of saving love for the whole world began at Christmas, not just on Easter Sunday.  God’s work of saving love already happened with the incarnation of Jesus.  Remember, another name for Jesus is Emmanuel, meaning God with us.  When we pray the word “Emmanuel,” we name the ongoing work of faith to find a manger-shaped space in our souls every day.  The above passage invites us to slow down and savor the sacred as we begin the season of Lent.

 

Where are you weary ~ could be physically, emotionally, spiritually, or relationally.

What burdens do you keep lugging around in your invisible backpack? 

Where have you convinced yourself that the pain is your cross to bear, but maybe God is asking you to set down and release the white-knuckle grip you have on that pain?

Where do you long for rest or renewal?

 

Lent doesn’t have to be serious and somber.  Lent is a call to be honest and heartfelt about connecting to the Holy.  First, we are invited to be honest with ourselves about how we can be frustrated, frenzied, and flummoxed by life right now.  How we live with the tension of doing normal things like eating, laughing, singing, shopping, going to the doctor, and talking to friends ~ when the world isn’t normal.  This tension longs to be named and grieved.  We ask for Emmanuel to meet us in the messiness and uncontrollability of life. 

 

Today, let Jesus’ invitation to bring all you carry.  As you do, join me as we softly sing to our souls the words of What a Friend We Have in Jesus, the third verse:

 

Are we weak and heavy laden,
cumbered with a load of care?
Precious Savior, still our refuge--
take it to the Lord in prayer!
Do your friends despise, forsake you?
Take it to the Lord in prayer!
In his arms he'll take and shield you;
you will find a solace there.

Prayer