For Lent Week 5, Monday. A response to the CoE’s #LiveLent reflection for the day. Photo by A Perry on Unsplash \\\* Without a care the birds flit blithely between the trees, their bare branches lit briefly as though by the light of exploding stars, bright colours and persistent chirps in their own ways declaring this is good.
For Week 3, Weekend of the CoE’s #LiveLent Devotional: \\\* The curse on the slithering snake is to toil ceaselessly, to eke each day’s living from the benighted earth. The promise we hold to is the blessing of the seventh, that after six summers of toil, the seventh brings rest and healing.
For Week 3, Thursday: \\\* The rush of locusts leaves the trees - once lush and green - bare, each fading away in the impermanence, of fields destroyed; the ground mourning the demise of a raw and an exquisite beauty. This is how the earth groans, curled up in pain at the wilfulness of wanton waste, a silent witness to the marks we’ve missed. We bring our clay, our bodies and and our burdens to this place to this aftermath of loss, and hope for redemption, that this place broken in the moment can be whole and holy once again.
For Week 3, Wednesday: \\\* Drop by drop flake by flake the seeds of life are coming and going a stairway between heaven and earth, words watering it with life, calling a harvest from dry things. Each seed is becoming a harvest; of redemption and salvation - joy returning where sadness once reigned.
For the Week 3, Tuesday reflection in the CoE’s #LiveLent Devotional: \\\* Trees planted by the river are blessed with the fortitude to resist the howling of the wind the pounding of the waves and the dying the heat and drying bring. Their roots hold together the soil, their leaves stay green even in the season of forgetting. So hold me, tell my heart to trust, to not waver in this season of distress.
For Day 11 of the CoE’s Lent 2020 Devotional. \\\* I come thirsty for your water, for its wetting and its washing for how it revivifies my dead and dying places making their hard, worn edges into soft and pliant spaes. I come thirsty, head bowed in quiet supplication, to live again.
For Week 1, Weekend of the CoE’s #LiveLent Devotional \\\* Into the dark night light shines, bit by bit driving fear away
For Week 1, Sunday of the CoE’s #LiveLent Devotional \\\* Over the cold dark swirling mists, the Spirit breathes then speaks: Light, come forth.
The next Beatitude begs the question what is righteousness, and how can we hunger and thirst after it? The Lent Pilgrim devotionals over the past few days have highlighted a few dimensions of this. First off from Romans 12:9-21 comes the idea of right behaviour, attitudes and actions which are in keeping with our Christian worldview. The implication here is that righteousness involves swimming against the flow, being truly counter-cultural in demonstrating love in spite of what moulds the wider world with its focus on personal attainment and looking out for number one seeks to press us in. The takeaway here is that we are to “overcome evil with good”(v21). ...
The focus for the last five days has been the Third Beatitude, Blessed are the Meek. Of the many definitions the Strong’s bible dictionary gives to the Greek ‘ praus’, two stand out - a disposition of spirit in which we accept His[God’s] dealings with us as good, and therefore without disputing or resisting and wholly relying on God rather than their own strength to defend them against injustice – which both speak to an acceptance of his Sovereignty. The Lent Pilgrim devotional chose to highlight other elements of this in the life of Jesus the quintessential meek one; his humility in not grasping equality with God (Phil 2:7) and playing the servant, washing his disciple’s feet (Jn 13:1-15). ...