If Lent accompanies the lengthening of days’ light and warmth toward spring for us in New Hampshire, it is also bringing a thickening of snow in the diocese. We know that beneath the blanket of blank whiteness is an earth eager to sprout, sap eager to run, leaves eager to bud. As I write this in an early Lenten snowstorm, I am aware of the teeming web of life that is shrouded and buried beneath our view, held in the frozen forest floors and the ponds, lakes, streams, and rivers around us.
Last week we heard and felt on our skin above our brows: “Remember that that you are dust and to dust you shall return” – words that especially resonate on this snow day that finds me cleaning out the stove firebox. Echoing those words are St. Paul’s:
Set your minds on things that are above, not on things that are on earth, for you have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God. Colossians 3:2-3
The aim of the Christian life is to uncover and meet the true self that God creates us to be. Lent is a time when we seek the life, hidden and full, within and among us. There we find traces of the image of God as seen in Jesus: humility, patience, courage, hunger for justice, sincerity, generosity, hope, faith, love. So often those elements of our true selves get buried in the blank and banal fallenness of our world. Like looking out at a frozen landscape, we can hardly recognize ourselves when we are most fully vibrant and alive. Using the counsels of Lent—prayer, contemplation, confession of sin, studying God’s Holy Word, fasting and self-denial, acts of compassion and kindness—the blizzard of separation and division that shroud us can slowly, flake by flake, inch by inch, melt away. Beneath us and within us we discover to the truer self that looks more and more like Jesus. And then, paradoxically, in the light of resurrection glory we can even behold and relish the stark and fierce beauty of winter.
When Christ who is your life is revealed, then you also will be revealed with him in glory.” Colossians 3:4
May we find ourselves greeting the Risen Christ at the end of our Lenten journey, revealed in his resurrection, bursting with life from the buried and cold prison of sin and death.
Yours Faithfully in the Risen Jesus,
+Rob