What are you doing for Lent?

by Kyle Wiseley

We are in the first few days of the forty days of Lent. Lent is the most penitential of the seasons of the church year. Where Advent helps us look within to prepare for the coming of Christ into our lives, it also has a significant element of hope and expectation. Lent inviters us to go more deeply within ourselves, to recognize and confront those attitudes and behaviors that damage ourselves and others. Doing this in a conscientious and serious way is an extremely difficult task. The experience can be like trying to exist in a desert without nourishment or comfort. Traditionally, using some act of personal sacrifice – giving up something – was meant to serve as an aid to self examination and contrition.

Today’s gospel tells of Jesus going into the desert after his baptism, presumably to discern how he was to carry out the ministry the call of which he felt so keenly. While he was there we are told of temptations he was offered: power, wealth, prestige, and release from hunger.

When we attempt a similar experience, we too experience temptation, often the temptation is to judge ourselves too harshly, to over-emphasize the recognition of our mistakes, shortcomings, and intentional sins. Although the desert is a harsh place, we need to remember that it also exists under God’s blue sky and nourishing sunlight and within its harsh boundaries often we unexpectedly discover refreshing oases with cool, pure, refreshing water. The desert is not an evil place – just harsh. It is a place for learning difficult lessons, for finding deep within one’s self, or sometimes with the help of others, hidden pools of spiritual resourcefulness and refreshment.

So perhaps, instead of giving up something for Lent, we might try adding something, perhaps a daily devotional activity or a project or gift to be given without expectation of thanks or recognition, remembering all the while that beyond this desert, this forty days of spiritual penitence and beyond the grief and pain of Christ’s Passion, we eagerly await the dawning of Easter morning and the joy that we feel in the realization of Resurrection.

Complications

by Kathy Douglass

I was sitting in my living room with my little piano student a few weeks back. We were in the middle of our lesson, reviewing the quarter note and the half note, calling out the names of the white keys and brushing up on our fingering. I scribbled a few notes in her assignment book while she twirled on the antique piano stool a friend had picked up for me at a yard sale.

We were just about to turn the page and begin our next piece when she looked up at me with her big blue eyes and asked, “Kathy, what are the black keys for?” We hadn’t gotten to the black keys yet. I’m a new teacher, she’s a new student, so we’re taking this nice and slow. I thought for a moment, and not wanting to confuse her or jump ahead too far, offered the simplest answer I could muster in my gentlest, beginning-piano-teacher voice. She slowly looked down at the keyboard, and then looked back up at me as her eyes widened and said… “whoa, this is gonna get complicated.”

Oh sweetie, you have no idea.

I’m new at this teaching thing, but I think we all understand intuitively that the response can be as important as the question. When my little gal said “whoa…”, it mattered to me, in that moment, how I respond. I didn’t want to look back at those big-blue eyes and say “oh, no, it’s not complicated at all.” I’ve been playing the piano since I was 6 years old, and I know different. I wanted to tell her the truth. There are some complications. There are key signatures and dotted-quarter notes, rests and dynamics, chords and flats, sharps and accidentals, half-steps, clefs and tempos, fermatas and, last time I checked, about 88 keys.

A few lessons into this, I knew it was way too early to mention too much of that, but I also wanted to honor her question. She’s eager, she’s curious, she’s giving herself a chance to become a pianist. So I simply said, “you’re right, kiddo. There are some things that will be complicated, but we’re just going to take this one lesson at a time, I will help you, and then, someday, you will be able to put together all you’ve learned and play whatever you like.” I said that with confidence, because once I was a little girl just learning how to play the piano, too. I worked, with lots of guidance and help, through some of the “complications”, and now, I can play. I told her the truth. She smiled, seemed satisfied, and twirled around one last time.

Her “whoa” really struck me. We’ve all heard children land squarely on the truth – “out of the mouths of babes”. And I’ve thought, since that evening, that if I can sit at my piano next to a spunky little girl and offer her assurance about what she doesn’t yet understand, what she hasn’t yet experienced, I can surely sit next to my Father and allow Him to teach and encourage and assure me. Lean in and listen for Him to tell me the truth. After all, He knows what He is doing with my “becoming”.

We come to God over and again with our questions, and sometimes we respond with what sounds like a “whoa”… “this is too hard, this hurts too much, where are we going, it’s too late, are you there?”

The Psalmist writes that “God desires truth in our innermost beings…” (Psalm 51:6). As His children, we were designed to desire the truth as well. Even if it’s complicated. Jesus wasn’t big on sugar-coating. He warned of sorrows and aches, brokenness, loss… complications. And yet… He also spoke the truths his Father wanted us to hear, so that we could believe, so that we could trust and follow – the truths of his Father’s presence, his Father’s intent and desire. He offered us a look into the heart of God; a heart as revealed through the prophet Jeremiah: “For I know the plans I have for you”, declares the Lord. “Plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to bring you a future and a hope.” (Jeremiah 29:11)

I chose the curriculum my little student and I are using because it’s interactive and fun, it’s full of color and whimsy. I also chose it because every lesson includes a student-teacher duet. Even if we’ve just taken the tiniest musical step forward, we get to hear, at the end of our lesson, how it sounds. It’s a favorite moment. I put my hands right next to hers on the keyboard, I guide and encourage and help her. We end our duets with a cheery “wahoo!” or a high-five or a great big “we did it!” She brings what she is learning; I bring what I know, and it is music.

Anne Lamott, a favorite writer of mine, said once: “how is it that you can play one note, and then another, and then your heart just breaks wide open?” I keep that in mind as I teach. My little student will experience that one day. I know she will. Despite the complications.

We’re not alone in our questions; we’re not alone in our quests. God is with us, His strong and tender hands covering our own, guiding, encouraging, drawing out of us what He first sang into our souls before the foundations of the world were laid. Songs of joy, songs of peace, songs of hope, songs of life.

The Pilates Prayer

by Judy Bevilacqua

With the arrival of January, the cellophane gets ripped off my shiny new calendar (mine purchased at the Victoria Art Museum, months before). A spankin’ clean New Year – free of erasure marks - tempts me to turn over a “new leaf” with the turning of that first crisp page of uncharted future. This year was no different. There I sat staring at the long list of classes at our local gym. I had recently read that your body actually gets used to a repeated routine of exercise and memorizes it. Like we all learned by rote the Pledge of Allegiance, and could recite it with no thought or effort. So too, apparently, the body learns the drill and it will eventually expend less energy and you get less benefit. Change is what shakes it up and wakes it up. Well, when it comes to exercise I need all the “bang for my buck” I can muster. My body, as well as my wallet, is facing a depressed economy, so I’m all for “expending” less and receiving more! Perusing the list of classes, I tried to find one that would prove the least embarrassing, most beneficial and with the lowest risk of fracture or cardiac arrest! I decided to try the morning Pilate’s class.

Arriving early for class, the new teacher looked far too young. But I grabbed a mat, bolstered my nerve and explained that I was a beginner, nervous and well, obviously a “senior.” Was there any advice for an old newbie? She waved her hand, as if to dispel my anxieties with fairy dust, and consoled me with these words: “Don’t worry, just remember to breathe! That’s the most important thing: your breathing. Next, learn to work from your center. Find your core. That will improve your strength and balance. And finally, don’t be distracted by what the person on the next mat is doing. Don’t try to keep up, just focus on what you are doing. Work at your own pace.”

They were good words, and during that next hour, I tried to remember them. But what I hadn’t counted on was that all through the next week, they kept on helping! But this time it was for the exercise of the soul. Perhaps, it was because of the Annual Business meeting at church, and the opportunity of turning a new page and a new leaf in our parish. Her words gave a new focus through all the prayers and the hopes, the possibilities and the challenges of that meeting about how, together, with God’s help, we can walk into an unknown future. I’m sure we’ll find some new muscles, and discover some changes to our “memorized routine.” But with practice, the Body of Christ can learn the great benefits of change and learn to build each other up in the coming year. As for me, I’m going to be praying the “Pilates prayer.”

“O Lord, keep us breathing - the breath of your Spirit.

Teach us that You are our center, the core of our being.

Train us to work from our gifts and strengths and find balance.

Help us protect the weaker parts of the body,

with gestures of gentleness and grace.

Guide our focus, so we won’t become distracted,

comparing ourselves with others.

Rather, lead us to rejoice in our unique calling.”

Amen.