wilderness, wednesday

Wednesday, March 12

Come to Stillness: Take a few minutes to allow your mind and heart to be still before God.

Opening Prayer: Lord I so want to make all of me ready and attentive and available to you.  Please help me to clarify and purify my intentions.  I have so many contradictory desires.  I get preoccupied with things that don’t really matter or last.

     I know that if I give you my heart whatever I do will follow my new heart.  In all that I am today, all that I try to do, all my encounters, reflections, even the frustrations and failings and especially in this time of prayer, in all of this, may I place my life in your hands.  Lord I am yours, make of me what you will.

~Ignatius of Loyola

Scripture Reading for the Day: Isaiah 35:1-10

Reading for Reflection:

In Christian tradition, one of the most solemn days of the church year is Ash Wednesday, when believers enter a season of preparation for Easter by confronting their own mortality.  That this season lasts forty days is no mistake.  Those who follow Jesus are meant to follow him into the wilderness, where they too may be tested. 

     For me, at least, the peak of the service comes when the priest invites the congregation forward to the altar rail to receive ashes on our foreheads.  Those of us who have done it before know that we are being invited to our own funerals.  Kneeling shoulder to shoulder at the rail, we wait our turn, hearing the priest say to others what will soon be said to us.  “Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return,” the priest says to me, making the sign of the cross on my forehead.

     Because she has just dipped her thumb in the cup of ashes, I get the full dose.  Extra ashes fall on the bridge of my nose.  I worry for a moment about how silly I will look when I stand up and turn around.  Then I get the sudden urge to ask for more, to ask for a whole bowl of ashes on my head.  But it is not yet my turn for a whole bowl.  For now, all I get is a taste of death, while there is still time to say please and thank you to the Giver of all life.

     Popular religion focuses so hard on spiritual success that most of us do not know the first thing about the spiritual fruits of failure.  When we fall ill, lose our jobs, wreck our marriages, or alienate our children, most of us are left alone to pick up the pieces.  Even those of us who are ministered to by brave friends can find it hard to shake the shame of getting lost in our lives.  And yet if someone asked us to pinpoint the times in our lives that changed us for the better, a lot of those times would be wilderness times. (An Altar in the World by Barbara Brown Taylor)

Reflection and Listening: silent and written

Prayer: for the church, for others, for myself

Closing Prayer: Almighty God, you alone can bring into order the unruly wills and affections of sinners: Grant your people grace to love what you command and desire what you promise; that, among the swift and varied changes of the world, our hearts
may surely there be fixed where true joys are to be found; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever. Amen. (A Collect for Lent)