lent readings, week two

To hear Brandi read this essay, click here: https://youtu.be/fG-tRc2PjsQ

For recovering productivity addicts, Lent offers an invitation to disrupt ingrained habits, to hit pause and allow a new rhythm to begin. Getting stuff done matters, but for some of us, like an addict who can’t take just one drink, it seems impossible to find another way to create a meaningful life. If you are primarily seen as the dependable efficient one, then checking things off the list—for you or for others—provides a consuming fix. While tasks are necessary, completing them can prevent other avenues for rest, for meaning, or for establishing our value.

Lent invites us to set aside time for stillness, for silence, for solitude. For some of us, the past 12 months have forced us, if not into the former, at least into stuck isolation. While we are here, we might as well look around and see what we see. I don’t like being disrupted. I don’t like being still when I want to move. I don’t like to move when I want to be still. In fact, I can get irrationally ragey when a task takes longer than I think it should, when I get interrupted, or when I feel trapped waiting on someone else. It is not my best look. But as a student of the life of Christ, I have to notice that he disrupted nearly every person he encountered. What’s more, he allowed himself to be disrupted. Almost like, as contemplative practitioners of Centering Prayer remind us: Jesus lived each day committed to consenting to the activity of the Divine Presence of God.

Consenting to the presence of God, being open to wherever it leads, sounds lovely, but it is also incredibly disruptive. I just took you on a long walk to remind you that being disrupted is part of the gig if you are a child of God. (Whispering now) We are all children of God. God’s handiwork, displays of God’s splendor. And. Crafted to be God’s hands and feet. God disrupts us by helping us acknowledge we are hip-deep in God’s Beloved Community. We get to sit there, and we get to take care of others there. We are still, and we serve. We are loved, and we love. We are alone, and we belong to others.

It is not realistic for a lot of us to cease activity in order to commune with God. It is possible for all of us, whether at work, rest or play, to consent to God’s disruptive, reorienting presence. Pay attention to your life. Familiar patterns of activity might serve you well, but they might rob you of the silent stillness you need to hear an ancient call to be still and known. To be disrupted.

For all of us, may a new rhythm draw us in, where we find ourselves moving at different paces. May our effort—or intentional rest—grow out of value and belonging, rather than determining it. In all the best ways, I hope you are disrupted by God this week.

To Ponder:

“Recovery involves quelling the riot of thoughts in the mind and thinking the overpopulation of images and feelings that accumulate with an abundance of activity. Silence and solitude are the recovery room for the soul weakened by busyness…In silence and solitude we regain our perspective, or more importantly, God’s perspective. Augustine described it as learning to ‘perform the rhythms of one’s life without getting entangled in them.’ Alone with God in prayerful quiet, the rhythms of life are untangled.”  -Howard Baker 

“Whatever may be the tensions and stresses of a particular day, there is always lurking close at hand the trailing beauty of forgotten joy or unremembered peace.”      -Howard Thurman

To Read:

Feb 24 Ps 120:1-2; 121:1-4

Feb 25 Zeph 3:14-18

Feb 26 Ps 107:1-9, 19-31

Feb 27 Daniel 6:25-28

Feb 28 Luke 6:20-31

Mar 1 Ecclesiastes 7:5-14

Mar 2 Ps 130