For several weeks a small book, The Way of the Traveler, written by Joseph Dispenza, has captured my attention and fed my spiritual life, fortifying my prayer. The author uses the experience of travel, a journey, to show the values of personal awareness to one’s own spiritual journey.
As we start our travel in the Lenten season, I have been most recently reading and rereading two very small parts: "Being Present" and "Sketching From Life." The first part is the inspiration for my own prayer and thinking. A quote from a Susan M. Watkins addresses the same topic. "Wherever your journey takes you, there are new "gods" (quotations mine so as not to mislead) waiting there, with divine patience — and laughter." She makes me imagine how our God must react as he watches us on our journeys and how we handle or mishandle graces he sends our ways.
Now our journeys bring us to another and new Lent. We have hardly caught our breaths from the rush of Christmas. Already we have opened the doors to a new place, Lent 2008. It is a new place because we are not the same as we were when Lent 2007 began.
As with any journey, however, we do bring something of our "homes" with us just as our ancestors of centuries ago did on their journeys when, literally, they took their homes with them. Like them, we might find ourselves in a new experience with the me that has changed since the last Lent. "The journey was home, and home was the journey" (Dispenza, p 89).
The experience we should seek is to be welcoming to the new season of Lent. For it to be an enriching experience, we have to be open to it. We cannot base the Lent of 2008 upon earlier experiences of Lent.: "I don’t get anything from Lent." Most likely this is a true statement if we carry older experiences of Lent with us. You are not supposed to get anything. It is to be a time of giving of self to the Lord. Your "gettings" come immediately after Lent with the death and resurrection of Jesus. If we are not open to the graces of Lent, we let pass opportunities to strengthen our spiritual lives. We let pass the gift of treating ourselves to a new experience of the Christ who redeemed us. Make room on your plate if you want Lent to be a spiritual moment of nourishment. And how make room?
We must make ourselves present to devotions and practices of the season. "We understand that all of the pieces of this new puzzle soon will be added to the complete picture of who we are. And where we have been, what we have done, and what we have been in this place far from home, finally, will be a part of what we know as home" (Dispenza, p 89).
Each Lent offers us the chance to leave behind what we may hope to change and to build a newer definition of ourselves. In the journey motif, we can at the end of Lent say where we will be is home.
As we start our travel in the Lenten season, I have been most recently reading and rereading two very small parts: "Being Present" and "Sketching From Life." The first part is the inspiration for my own prayer and thinking. A quote from a Susan M. Watkins addresses the same topic. "Wherever your journey takes you, there are new "gods" (quotations mine so as not to mislead) waiting there, with divine patience — and laughter." She makes me imagine how our God must react as he watches us on our journeys and how we handle or mishandle graces he sends our ways.
Now our journeys bring us to another and new Lent. We have hardly caught our breaths from the rush of Christmas. Already we have opened the doors to a new place, Lent 2008. It is a new place because we are not the same as we were when Lent 2007 began.
As with any journey, however, we do bring something of our "homes" with us just as our ancestors of centuries ago did on their journeys when, literally, they took their homes with them. Like them, we might find ourselves in a new experience with the me that has changed since the last Lent. "The journey was home, and home was the journey" (Dispenza, p 89).
The experience we should seek is to be welcoming to the new season of Lent. For it to be an enriching experience, we have to be open to it. We cannot base the Lent of 2008 upon earlier experiences of Lent.: "I don’t get anything from Lent." Most likely this is a true statement if we carry older experiences of Lent with us. You are not supposed to get anything. It is to be a time of giving of self to the Lord. Your "gettings" come immediately after Lent with the death and resurrection of Jesus. If we are not open to the graces of Lent, we let pass opportunities to strengthen our spiritual lives. We let pass the gift of treating ourselves to a new experience of the Christ who redeemed us. Make room on your plate if you want Lent to be a spiritual moment of nourishment. And how make room?
We must make ourselves present to devotions and practices of the season. "We understand that all of the pieces of this new puzzle soon will be added to the complete picture of who we are. And where we have been, what we have done, and what we have been in this place far from home, finally, will be a part of what we know as home" (Dispenza, p 89).
Each Lent offers us the chance to leave behind what we may hope to change and to build a newer definition of ourselves. In the journey motif, we can at the end of Lent say where we will be is home.
