In the Lenten Spring

By chance I read the back of the ketchup bottle in the diner while waiting for my meal. If it's true for ketchup - that it makes people smile - how much more true it is for us! That we can make people smile. 

Mother Teresa would often say that a smile is the gift we all have to give to someone else. World of tears, fears, loneliness, discouragement, despair. Feeling un-invited, excluded, unwanted, forgotten. Today is Lent's half-way point.

At the Lighting of the Lamps

Greek artist Loukas Geralis (1875-1958) gives us this painting titled, "Lighting of the Candles." Actually, the young fellow is lighting oil lamps in the chapel before the sanctuary icons. He has  gently pulled the lamp down by its pulley. His oil can with its long spout stands on the wood bench. A friend who lived in a Russian monastery for some time was given this job of waking up even earlier than the monks to light the chapel lamps each morning  He said it was a mystical time of silence and stillness.

But once again, this outer world moment symbolizes an interior event: each morning, lighting the lamp of trusting, interceding, hoping, commending, struggling, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. wrote: Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that."

We might join this devout young lamp-lighter as he prays and lights the darkness-dispelling lamps. Can you name it? We might pray protection from the darkness - the darkness that wants to invade and un-nerve us each day. Some of it originates from inside; some from elsewhere:

• from the darkness of my worst impulses, protect me, Lord.
• from dark responses, protect me, Lord.
• so much of what we do and say isn't really necessary or helpful, protect me, Lord.
• from obsessing so much, protect me, Lord.
• from dire, panicked predictions, protect me, Lord.
• from disgust, cynicism and depression, protect me, Lord.
• from the darkness of trouble-makers, haters and resent-ers, protect me, Lord.
• from the bad-spirit of punishment and ill will, protect me, Lord.

The Message of the Sugaring Season

The Pennsylvania Maple Sugar Syrup season has already come and gone. Sometime between the middle of January through the middle of February, during some days of a freeze-that, freeze-thaw cycle, the sap of the Maple trees starts to run.

Maple trees produce a liquid mix of ground water and sugar which moves up and down the tree depending on the late winter temperatures. The trees are tapped and the sap is collected in buckets. Thickened by evaporation forty gallons of the watery sap is transformed into about one gallon of concentrated syrup. 

What happens in the outer, natural world is symbolic or reflective of what can happen in our inner world. Transformation is the message of the Maple Syrup Season. Many people won't explore that - like the man in the peach orchard who contents himself with counting leaves. 

"You have come a new creation and have clothed yourself in Christ," the priest says to the newly baptized. A new creation! And Jesus said, "I have come that you may have life and have it in all its fullness." John 10:10

Catholics have transformation at the center of their religious-spiritual lives. At every Mass we hear these words prayed over the bread and wine: 

Therefore, O Lord, we humbly implore you: by the same Spirit graciously make holy thee gifts we have brought to you for consecration, that they may become the Body and Blood of your Son our Lord Jesus Christ at whose command we celebrate these mysteries.

Eucharist doesn't mean only that the bread and wine are transformed, but we're supposed to be transformed too. Don't just admire Christ, don't just believe in Christ, don't even just content myself trying to imitate Christ, but BE Christ. 

But what's the transformation? St. Irenaeus says, "The glory of God is the human person fully alive." The Eastern Christian calls it divinization. One Anglican priest speaks of it this ways: Individuation is the process by which the individual in the course of his/her life is pressed to realize his innate capacities to the full and become what he has it in him to become." And Carl Jung said that to be another Christ means that "I would live my own unique self as truthfully and as beautifully as Christ lived his."

How do I do that? I might begin by imagining it for myself. We say, You are what you eat. We might also say: You are what you listen to; You are what you read; You are what you look at; You are what you choose; You are what you fall in love with; You are what you desire. 

Be Christ! Transform resentment, fear, despair into new energies. That's an important place from which to start. Take Jesus at his word and desire the fullness-life he promises. That full life is for NOW. Innate capacities means that from the moment I came to exist, God had gift-ed each of us with possibilities and potentials. Many of us have never given these things any serious attention.

Spring enjoins us to transformation