Out the window of my third-floor study loom shades of grey. Charcoal tree branches absent of leaves. Ashen sky successfully hiding any hint of Earth’s red sun. Slate rooftop sheltering families. Sometimes the landscape mirrors the heaviness of the season. We muddle through Lent. We open our eyes to the news of bombs falling on cities and military bases. We carry the misery of friends burdened with life-threatening illness and debilitating worries. Where is our faith on the greyest of days?
Someone has said that many folks relate more to the despair of Good Friday than to the joyful shouts of Alleluia on Easter Sunday. Lent is an invitation or at least permission to linger in what hurts – the regrets, the brokenness, the unrelenting evil. If our Christianity does not speak to us these days, if it is only good on joyful occasions, then it would not be of much use.
In the Bible’s songbook, the Psalms record the angst of the people of God. “How long must I bear pain in my soul, and have sorrow in my heart all day long?” The apostle Paul wrote to the early Christians in Corinth, “For now we see in a mirror, dimly,” Jesus cries out from the cross, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me.”
The God who created us companions us through sorrow. Some have even said that in the dark night of the soul, they have sensed God’s presence more vividly. Along the journey, even one person can be a source of consoling love. As Paul writes:
“Now I know only in part; then I will know fully, even as I have been fully known. And now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; and the greatest of these is love.”
Even in our desolation, we hunger for love, we ache out of our devotion to the beloved, we reimagine love. Wendell Berry writes:
“I believe that the world was created and approved by love, that it subsists, coheres and endures by love, and that, insofar as it is redeemable, it can be redeemed only by love. I believe that divine love, incarnate and indwelling in the world, summons the world always toward wholeness, which ultimately is reconciliation and atonement with God.” (Another Turn of the Crank, p. 89)
Grace and Peace,
Carla
