March Journal, Third Sunday in Lent

O Lord, thou has searched me out and known me…

Storms have battered the Bay Area this weekend, with high winds wailing around our house and temperatures dropping. Mt. Diablo is covered in mist and I wondered about snow but not yet according to local weather data. Still, the drama of the change in weather is never-ending, and although many try and forecast and prophecy the future days, mankind is not in control, although he pretends to be.

The battering of the earth with rain and wind reflects the battering of our souls in Lent. It is a season of regret, of confession, of repentance. It is a time to face the truth about who we are, what we have done, and what we will do. It is a time of turning back or facing a crossroads and reading the signposts. Heaven? Hell? Which way am I headed? Which way do I desire to go?

I’ve found it compelling that Jesus asks the sick and the lame, before he heals them, “Do you want to be healed?” Seems an obvious answer, but he asks. For if there is no desire to be healed, there can be no healing. If there is no desire to love or be loved, there can be no love.

So Lent is a time to ask ourselves, what exactly do we want? From life? From the past, the present, the future? We take stock of our souls.

There is a character in my novel-in-progress that has done a great evil in her past. She wishes today she had not done this, but she handles her regret and guilt and horror too, by denying her past.

This may be the greatest human error of all, to not face up to our failings. I believe that a good number of women who rally and march for “a woman’s right to choose” have made the wrong choice in their past. For them to protect the unborn today would mean they must face what they have done.

This is no easy task, after fifty years of abortion on demand, and fifty years of women making deadly choices, gargantuan choices of life and death. It is a high wall to climb over, a steep and rocky mountain to ascend, to turn around and say I’m sorry, let’s change the law. Let’s protect these innocent lives. But to face the horror of the act is beyond many, even if they were misled by our culture of sexual liberation, and most were, to my thinking. In this sense, these women are victims as well.

It’s almost demonic, for like in today’s Gospel, the demons return in greater numbers than the first one, circling the soul with lies, dividing and felling God’s house, scattering and not gathering. “He that is not with me is against me,” Our Lord says.

And so these words are stirring my will to watch and pray for our country, our people, our families, and our unborn. We must fill our hearts and minds with Christ, nothing less, to protect us from the demonic dividers.

I’m finding great consolation and inspiration in returning to Psalm 139 to memorize once again. I’ve been working on this one for too many Lents to admit. Morning and night, stirring it into other memorized prayers has helped, and the phrases do come easily to mind from all those past Lents. In this way I have been baptized with the Psalms, the words showering my soul with beauty and hope.

O Lord, thou hast searched me out and known me…

This first phrase touches me deeply, his searching me out and his knowing me. It’s the shepherd finding the lost sheep, as David must have done, so that when I am on that precipice looking down into the depths of a dark valley, the storm all around me, I know Christ is with me.

And I have found as I work on my second draft of The Music of the Mountain, that this Psalm wants to live within the story as chapter epigraphs….

Or, as Snoopy typed while sitting atop his dog house, “It was a dark and stormy night…” Indeed. Here’s hoping we see spring soon with all its bright inspiration, beauty, peace, and most of all, resurrection.