Lentil Soup Lenten Season

It’s Lent again. I’ve come to the same conclusions: I normally fail. This year I decided to get up for Morning Prayer at St. Paul’s. For two weeks I was going strong, and then I wouldn’t get up for Saturday or I would just sleep in this day. And then my room mate, who has given up her love of Diet Coke for Lent, asks, “What about morning prayer?”

Ohhhh, but it’s just so early. There are so many things that are good about it. I physically have to prepare in order to go: figure out when I’m taking showers because I am not getting up super early, get my homework done at a decent hour, make the decision to go to bed early. It’s not that much to sacrifice but it’s just different, it’s not what I’m normally used to.

And I even love getting up early, going outside and hearing the early morning birds as I walk to my car. Sitting at St. Paul’s and watching as the sun rises higher and shines light into the sanctuary. Starting off my day with the confession of sin. Starting off my day with communion and community and drinking coffee. Why the heck not?

But, I’ve failed again. Another Lenten season, another reminder that I continually need grace, that I always need discipline.

Kathleen Norris in her book, A Cloister Walk, describes the daily hearing of scripture in the Daily Office of Morning Prayer: “For a long time I had no idea why I was so attracted to the Benedictines, why I keep returning to their choirs. Now I believe it’s because of the hospitality so vast that it invites all present into communion with the text being read. I encounter there not a God who rejects me because I can’t pass some dogmatic litmus test but one who invites me to become part of a process, the continuing revelation of holy word. Heard aloud, the metaphors of scripture are roomy indeed; they allow me to relax, and listen, and roam. I take them in, to my “specific strength,” as Emily Dickinson put it in her poem “A Word made Flesh is seldom.” And I hope to give something back.” (217)

I’ve had a lot of conversation lately about individual experience of good and bad and how that shapes our notion of good and bad. For instance, I’ve experienced good and bad in the Catholic church and different Protestant denominations. Life is available in both places, but sometimes our views, or our families’ views, are shaped by our experience of ‘bad’ in one denomination and ‘good’ in another. Sometimes I wish we could set up booths of confession like Donald Miller talks about in Blue Like Jazz, except we would confess to each other as Christians, not to the outside world. I would apologize for the way you were hurt when a priest told you your marriage wasn’t legitimate, for the way the Vatican seems powerful and far away and not personable, for tradition offending your notion of God. And maybe someone could say “I’m sorry” about all the times I’ve been told that I’m going to hell because I’m Catholic, for the notion that the Holy Spirit isn’t present in the mass/structured forms of worship, for the belief that my infant baptism isn’t legitimate. Maybe then we could start to let some things go.

I know my experience lately has told me that the lectionary, the sacraments, and the daily offices of prayer are awesome. I translate that into all those things being preferable to other forms of worship, mostly because my experience in high school with the charismatic movement was not good. But that doesn’t mean that the charismatic movement is bad. In all things there are goods and bads. I hope to continue to transcend my experience—Lent is for reflection!

Green Man

Lest you thought I was dead, O Ye of little faith.

My Faith and Writing Statement for my Grad Application to Seattle Pacific University's MFA in Creative Writing:

My writing and my faith have been intrinsically connected since the first grade. In those early years, my life consisted of growing up in a white farmhouse on a hill next to a two-story barn with peeling red paint. A glorified road composed of two ruts side by side in the ground winded their way slowly up two fields of corn to acres of green grass, a mossy pond, and a thick line of trees that composed the end of my backyard and the beginning of the forest. Without neighbors or a suitable TV antenna, my days were spent sitting underneath my favorite tree, digging my fingernails into the newly dug soil surrounding my mother’s tulip bulbs, constantly imagining different characters and their stories. The heavy smell of the topsoil was like incense, awakening in me the thoughts that occurred underneath the tree so many times before. I would sit back against my tree and watch as the wind rippled through the yellow corn stalks, listen as it greeted the leaves above me, and then close my eyes as it blew the long strands of blond hair away from my face, entering into the place where I felt most like myself: my imagination.
I sat in church with the same attitude; a place that was as mystical and thought provoking as the spot underneath my tree. Most of my days in church were spent in white, hooded robes holding the prayer book for the priest or lighting the candles for the mass. I would sit as the familiar words of scripture were read, listening to the baptismal font percolate in the back, digging my fingernails into the red plush of the pew until it was time to help with communion. The iconic symbols before me were so familiar: Eucharist, chalice, table, and cross. This familiarity allowed me to enter into the same place of imagination, a place that I viewed as holy from the time spent in the pews flanking the side of the altar.
My front yard and my pew in church served as the foundations for the two most important areas in my life: writing and faith. Both of these places allowed me a sense of the simple, the symbolic, and the passing of time, where writing was more like a religious discipline and faith a place of great description and imagination. The simplicity of the way a leaf fell to the ground or the way the light increasingly shined through the tall, glass windows at church shaped my idea of the experience of joy and whetted my appetite to flesh out these experiences with words.
The symbols I found in church came to life in the outdoors. The green fabric that lined the altar and the vestments of the priest to symbolize growth in Ordinary Time during the summer was the same green I found when I looked up into the leaves from the base of my tree. In the same manner, the darkness and expectation of light that I experienced in Advent, Christmas, and Lent corresponded with the cracking, ice laden tree branches and the sun setting at 4:30 pm. These memories of years before continue to be the subject matter of what I write about today, continuing to yearn for meaning as I continue to pass through the different seasons of the Church and the different seasons of nature.
This passing of time displayed itself outside my front door with the planting and harvesting of crops, the changing color and falling of leaves. Alongside of this was the marking of time in the continual retelling of the Christ drama both in each individual mass and the liturgical seasons occurring throughout the year. I have learned that the passing of time is my greatest asset, affording me rich experiences that continue to teach me as I mature in the areas of faith and writing.
As I entered high school and college, it was evident that the imaginations of my childhood and the time I spent in the white, hooded robes were not simply a phase. Leadership with the attitude of a servant and expressing my thoughts through words became ways of life. I entered college as an English major, hoping that I would learn how to wield my imagination into words in honor of the little girl that stapled pieces of paper together to resemble a book about the flowers circling the base of the tree in the front yard. I also became a Resident Assistant, knowing that my place was with people.
I did not expect to find a new appreciation for Christ and the Church, as I had left the symbolism and traditional nature of the Catholic church behind in high school, wooed by my high school Evangelical friends’ descriptions of their very friendly, very present Jesus. Without the same friends in college, I found myself stripped of the faith I thought I built at the non-denominational church down the road, realizing that I only took on their mindsets to be accepted, not because I actually believed them. During this time I frequented the bench on the quad surrounded by trees in order to journal, to try and make sense of my feelings. I watched as the trees passed from alive to dead to alive again, claiming one of the only truths I knew to be true at this time: the passing of time would break the ground of my heart, allowing for the hope of something to grow again.
Junior year found my heart ready as I decided to take on a Religion minor after taking a class focusing on the Pauline Epistles. This class required me to research and write about my findings, allowing me to begin my quest to understand and respond in writing to biblical texts. I found in both the Old and New Testament a continual struggle to understand the past and to understand God. I found texts about the holy judgment of God laid next to texts of His restorative nature. I fell in love with Judaism and the history of the Israelites. My heart began to feel soft, ready to take the risk of growing again.
I started going to a small, traditional church that reads the lectionary, engages in the Offices of Prayer, offers communion every Sunday, and marks time by the same Church calendar seasons I grew up with. I let the familiarity of the services wash over me as I pondered the meaning of the strange sculptures hung on the walls of the church. Pieces of wood with the appearance of human chests were wrapped around stalks of wheat and gnarled branches from trees. I later found out that the sculptures represented the myth of the Green Man, an early story that may have been connected with the redemptive myth of Christ. I was overwhelmed as I realized that I was literally surrounded by pieces of art that not only drew their focus from a myth that weaves in and out of literature, but the sculptures also symbolized growth, restoration, and redemption. Jesus had truly met me where I was and began to restore in me a sense of mystery and symbolism, calling me to respond in the same traditional manner of my childhood. I felt like the sculptures of the Green Man, sure that trees had started to grow out of my heart in response to my renewed appreciation for the rich symbolism of tradition.
The only way I know how to process my past and present experiences of community in the hearing of the Word and the participation in the table is to write, telling the redemptive stories that are both mine and the community’s, as we continue to respond to God as time quickly passes around us.