February Journal, Sexagesima Sunday

High winds and steady rain are sweeping the Bay Area today, rattling the trees, unsettling the natural world in which we live. We are in the season of hoping for spring, for Easter, for resurrection. Seeds deep in the dark earth will rise to the light of day and bear fruit. We prepare for that day, that moment, in the season that is called our life in time, our lifetime.

Our lives are trajectories that begin when we are conceived. From that moment we are nurtured by another human being, the mother who gives her lifeblood so that we may grow within her womb, miraculously independent of the mother and yet miraculously connected. I believe the greatest blessing of being a woman is the gift of carrying a child within her body. Her body becomes the manger, and we cradle the infant within us, singing and sighing, wondering and hoping, not knowing the future of this new person, who he will become.

I was blessed with one full term pregnancy in a difficult time in my life, but I never second guessed the magnificence of the experience. Life might be hard, but it was glorious. I remember the movement of my son and the little kicks he made, ensuring me that he was separate from me, and that I was the home in which he lived for a short time. I sensed early on that this child was not my body, and the choices I made as I rode the bus to work would affect a separate individual, for he was not an extension of me. I did not own him. He was not my property.

We strive to understand the miracle of life and yet take it for granted. But all the world revolves around the birth of the next child, and the next, and the next. The stars watch and wait. The moons hover over, looking down. The rain falls onto the seeded earth expressly so that those seeds may ripen and burst into the world of oxygen.

In this season of life and death and life again, Christians celebrate resurrection. And yet the promise is more than rising to new life when our bodies die. For God enters our hearts today, if we let him. Resurrection is now, when our spirits are enlivened by the Holy Spirit through sacraments and prayer.  Eternity is now, as etched on a monk’s gravestone in the Community of the Resurrection in Yorkshire, for God the Son is present in the bread and the wine. We sing the songs and pray the prayers with others of Christ’s body, so that our hearts will be open when Christ knocks on the door. Do we recognize the knock? Do we know the person that will live inside us, giving us eternal grace and glory?

Ash Wednesday is next week, a time when we admit our helplessness. Repent, we are told, for the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand. Repent. Change. Obey God’s law. The Church helps us do this by feeding us and cradling us. For without the life of the Body of Christ, the Church, we have no life beyond the grave. And so we listen to what is read, what is preached, what is celebrated, what is consecrated. We listen and we take part by partaking. In this family of God, we find the love of the Creator, a love that will recreate each one of us. He will see the ashen cross on our forehead and he will know us by our contrition. We must repent.

We examine our lives and purge those parts that break God’s law. We seek new habits, new ways of living, so that in these forty days of Lent we grow in grace as we are meant to do.

In today’s Gospel reading, Christ told the parable of the sower and the types of soil the seeds fall on. In Lent we look at the soil of our hearts and we create a fertile bed for the Word to implant his spirit within us. We feed that soil with sacrament and scripture and the dance of liturgy, so that when Easter comes, we are reborn into the light of love.

Our Lord is like a rainbow, offering us every color in the prism of life. But we cannot see the rainbow if we are blind. Lent heals our blindness so that we can see the colors, so that we can know love eternal, and life eternal. 

Life is a glorious miracle and mystery. We need only see. We need only open our hearts for love to blossom and allow the rainbow to fill our skies.