19. What is God's invitation for us at this season of our lives?

The Rising: Living the Mysteries of Lent, Easter, and Pentecost by Wendy M. Wright. Our church is going through a bible study on Thursday nights with this book right now. It is a good chance for discussion mid-week.

Desert Listening

"Several years ago I was invited to give a Lenten retreat in Wyoming at a thriving university campus Catholic parish. The parish ministers had gone to great lengths to make the Lenten season come alive for their parishioners. Worship services were carefully designed to heighten the Lenten mood. Visually, the church interior proclaimed the seasonal mood. Banners of the traditional Lenten purple (the liturgical color of penance) hung from the ceiling of the church. There were also large earthenware bowls filled with sand decorating the steps leading to the altar. While this in itself is not unusual in denominations that are highly liturgical, this parish high in the mountainous plains of Wyoming had at least one visual and tactile sign that was unique. They had filled the holy water fonts that stand at the doorways to the church with desert sand. Entering the sanctuary it is customary to dip one's fingers in the water and make the sign of the cross. During this year's season that habitual gesture would be arrested in process. One would find one had dipped into the dryness of sand.

"By this hand-dipping gesture I was made keenly aware of the Lenten desert invitation. I was taken back not only to Jesus' wilderness drama but also to the desert ascetics of fourth century Egypt, Palestine, and Syria. For me they are models of discernment. These zealous Christians, convinced that discipleship meant a radical transformation of life, left the "world" with its false values and fled to the desert, there to do battle with the "worldly" demons lodged in their own hearts. Pride, greed, self-aggrandizement, lust for power -- all the false motivations that drive human beings -- were ferreted out and replaced by the spirit of Christ: the spirit of compassion, humility, and purity of heart.

"The key to the transformation of the desert was the ascetic's listening ear. In silence and solitude they cultivated a hearing attuned to catch the voice of God. They learned that going apart from the noisy environment of daily life to the silence of the desert enabled them to perceive deeper levels of noise and silence. In the desert's quiet they discovered the noisiness within, the restless cacophony of voices raging in their hearts. Yet if they persevered further, they found that beneath that was another level of silence, an abyss of stillness that encompassed all that exists. There, in the primal silence within the human heart, the voice of God could be clearly heard." [this last would be an interesting sermon illustration for the story of Elijah on Mount Sinai in 1 Kings 19]

"The patient process of untangling the threads of voices, of settling down to the center was the lifelong work of the desert. It is our work as well. Like the desert ascetics, we must learn the art of inner listening. Where do the many voices within come from? And where do they lead? To self-aggrandizement and judgement of others, or to compassion and reconciliation? Which of the voices is the voice of God? To what am I called? What is God's invitation for me at this season of my life?

"Lent is a time for tuning our ears, for listening carefully, for discerning the texture and quality of our own demons, for attending to God's unceasing, creative plea amidst the noise of cultural pressures, the busyness of life, and our own self-limiting habits. Some of our Lenten discernments may be fairly straightforward. We may have become inattentive in our eating or drinking and need to give our oversatiated bodies a holiday. We may need to curb a smoking habit that endangers the health of those we live with as well as ourselves. We may need to cultivate a more rhythmic pattern of prayer or bring the scriptures into clearer focus in our everyday life. We may need to mend the pieces of a broken relationship. We may need to take some of the time we hoard so tightly for work and lavish it on our children or friends. We may be called to respond to the cry of the poor, to feed the hungry, to shelter the homeless, or to visit the prisoner. All these can rightly be discerned as God's prompting to a freer life.

"But the ongoing process of discernment, which I think is the more subtle invitation of the Lenten season, is not always so straightforward. It involves a radical and risky self-evaluation and a commitment to rethink and rework everything you know you are. God is always calling us out of ourselves, into a more generous freedom, so that we can love and serve ourselves and one another more authentically.

"What does that freedom look like for each of us this season? We might have images in our minds as to what we ideally should be. But perhaps soemtimes the ideal is less important that the real. The spiritual life is not a generic undertaking, despite the fact that it is often characterized as such. Rather, it involves the unique encounter of a particular woman or man in her or his concrete history and circumstances with the God who dared and continues to dare to be incarnate in human form. The spiritual life is never twice the same. Always utterly new, always surpising, the human meeting with God through the discernment of spirits invites us to become listeners to God's voice heard among the multitude of voices crowding the human heart. We must be open to hear the surprising message it may bring." (p. 32-34)