(p)Lent(y)

Calming down at the tail end of Ash Wednesday.

Led worship tonight at Marble. Came up with a new liturgy this year (after last year's liturgy fell like a stone). It worked well. Our Lenten focus at Marble is on "hunger." What are you hungry for? It seemed like a rich theme... we'll see. Will looking closely at hunger help us better understand our limits, and therefore, the places that God encounters us in our need and failings? What do our physical, emotional, and spiritual hungers teach us about the relationship between self and God?

I'm engaging the physical part of hunger personally, but modestly: Lenten lunches will be rice. I'll do a 48 hour fast between Good Friday and Easter morning, maybe leaving out two meals every day during Holy Week. I'm also doing a good amount of reading on hunger. Starting with Hunger: An Unnatural History by Sharman Russell, going to the novel Hunger by Knut Hamson, and finishing with End Hunger Now by Dole, McGovern, and Messer.

I need Lent this year. I need it to deepen my own spiritual walk. These last few months of journeying with my daughter as she has struggled to get off life support have been psychologically and spiritually grueling. I feel numb. I get up every day thinking about Margaret Grace, but my powerlessness to make her better faster means that my mind can't get a "grip" on her. I've yet to hold her or feed her, or even see her other than through a clear plastic screen. I have a daughter--and yet, I don't. It's a bewildering feeling. At the same time, Beth and I have been soldiering on together, keeping the family up by juggling and tag-teaming our tasks. But where is our relationship? I have a wife--but in a way, I haven't.

Work has been impossible to focus upon. So has my future. I feel like the last 5 months of my working life--and the rather prominent part of my identity that is yoked to my work--have disappeared down a sinkhole. I feel a need to re-discover my spiritual center as a way to re-awaken and re-enliven my call. I need the energy for working and living that can only come from the Spirit.

I was listening to "Pray-as-you-go" on my iPod this morning on the way up to the hospital to visit Margaret and the guide asked me whether I was willing to "turn to God" this Lenten season. My gut reply was: I think I need to turn from turning to God. I've kept my face turned toward God through this whole ordeal. And spiritually, I feel exhausted, weak. I don't blame God. I just feel like God and I need to step back and re-engage.

So that's my Lent as it looks today. If you're curious what other folks are doing, check out the Christian Century's blogroll, Theolog.