Lent: Celebrate

Here's a neat little observation about celebrations: They always require other people

Fourth of July cookouts. Bat mitzvahs. Graduation parties. Thanksgiving dinner. Wedding receptions. They all involve food, but more importantly they include the presence of loved ones.

You don't even need a reason. Just gather some friends and some family around, and enjoy one another's company. You'll celebrate in no time.

Lent: Fruit

Fruit is an odd photo prompt for mid-March. We still have six weeks to go until last frost in this state. We're just getting started planting cold weather crops like lettuce and peas. Fruit won't grow on the trees until July.

These little fellows came here from Mexico. My daughter likes to snack on them, and I was able to get them at the store on Tuesday before the leagues started canceling games and everyone started to realize how ill-prepared we were for a pandemic.

The rush on stores the past several days are fruit too, born of the seeds we planted months and years ago, to elect someone unqualified for office, to wait idly by when news of the virus first surfaced in China, not to store items sooner, not to store our own surplus produce from last summer's garden, not to garden at all.

Every moment of our lives, we sow the seeds of the future. Every moment we harvest the fruit of the seeds we sowed in the past, or that others sowed before us.

Sometimes the seed fails, and other times it's a bumper crop we'll be eating for years to come.


Copyright © 2020 by David Learn. Used with permission.


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Lent: Work

Lots to do this coming week, There's paperwork to catch up on for my internship, assignments coming due for class, and projects that while not due yet, are now visible on the horizon.

Then there's the never-ending procession of work and projects that happen when you live in New Jersey have a family, and own a house. It never stops.

And then there are the other thing we do, to give life meaning and purpose.

Work is a good thing. It was one of the first gifts given in Paradise.

Work while it is still light; night is coming when no one can work.


Copyright © 2020 by David Learn. Used with permission.


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Lent: Seeks

There’s a saying attributed to Jesus in the gospels that goes like this: Seek and you shall find; knock, and the door will be opened; ask, and the gift shall be given.”

It all begins with our determination to seek. An old woman tears apart her house looking for the money she’d planned to live off in her old age. A jeweler looks for the deal of a lifetime. A heartsick father goes searching highways and ditches for his headstrong absent child.

The tricky thing about seeking is that what we think we're looking for and what we find aren't always the same thing. We tell everyone we want to climb the mountain; we may even describe with fascination the road to the peak and the wonders that wait at the top. But all the while, our feet tell a different story; the path we choose day to day takes us to the beach instead of even to the foothills.

Why the discrepancy? It's a question many of us face halfway to the finish line. Maybe we really do want to stand above the snowline and plant our flag there, in which case we need to make major changes and reset our daily priorities in order to realize our dreams. Maybe we once desired the blazing glory of the mountaintop but have a discovered a softer glory in obscurity. Or maybe we still want it, but have lost our way and are fighting a contrary current to push our way back and seek what was lost before it's too late and opportunity is gone forever.

What is it you seek? And are you seeking it in such a way that it will be found?


Copyright © 2020 by David Learn. Used with permission.


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Lent: Spring

Down by the foot of our driveway is a maple tree growing on a small strip of grass between the sidewalk and the road on an easement the city owns that runs through our front yard.

The tree is about fifteen high, with a canopy that spreads over our flower bed, our driveway and the neighbor's, and a piece segment of the road big enough to park a car under, during the summer. Part of this spread is because, about 6 feet from the ground, the tree trunk forks into three co-dominant stems, and each segment grows about 120 degrees from each of its sisters.

Or they used to. About nine years ago, Hurricane Irene came through the area, canceling flights, flooding low-lying areas and generally being a hurricane. A week after the storm had passed, the old girl dropped one of her three stems, kerplunk, right onto the road.

The city (eventually) came and carted the fallen branch away, and in the nine years since, the tree has continued to grow new leaves every spring, stretch its arms out a little wider and stand a little taller ... as the wound where the missing stem grew becomes a little worse, and more and more of the lesser branches on the surviving stems wither and die under the strain.

We always think of spring as a time of new beginnings and renewal, but that's a hollow promise to some. It must be awful when you don't know you're already dead.


Copyright © 2020 by David Learn. Used with permission.


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Valley of Dry Bones

 If you had ten minutes to talk with any one person in the Bible, whom would you talk to?

Would you talk theology with Paul? Ask Jesus to explain why it has to hurt so much? Maybe you'd ask Joshua what it was like to see the walls of Jericho fall, or Moses how he felt to see Pharaoh's army drown and know that Israel was really and finally free.

Go ahead and ask David to talk about courage, or ask Daniel about lions. I want to hear what they tell you. As for me, I want to talk to one of those nameless multitudes in Ezekiel's valley.

"What was it like?" I want to ask. "How did you end up in the valley? Did someone lead you there, or was it just an accident? Were all those other people with you, or did you think you were going there by yourself?"

And what was it like in the valley? It seems like such a desolate place by the time Ezekiel found it, but what did it look like when you arrived? Did you stay because it seemed beautiful, or was it so barren that you just gave up?

It must have been a dreadful experience being dead in a place like that. All around you are neighbors with stories like your own, but it's impossible to share them because birds have eaten the tongue you once used to tell them, and you've lost the ears that would have understood anything that was spoken.

So you just lay there in the valley, as the the sun slowly rises in the east, inches his way across the sky, and then goes to sleep at night. Years pass that way until all your flesh has blown away; your bones are bleached and white, picked clean by worms; and you lie there forgotten even to yourself, no name, no story, not even a clear claim to which bones are yours and which belong to your neighbor.

Until one day that man appeared in the valley, and impossible things happened. The valley shook, the rattling of bones echoed from the hills, and the legions of the dead remembered who they were. Shins to femurs. Femurs to hips. Vertebra to vertebra. All across the ground, dust swirled, organs grew, sinews knitted themselves once more to frames, skin stretched itself over bodies, and the bodies stood and to a one, they all remembered how to breathe.

Tell me about that moment. Everything else I want to know pales in comparison.

Lent: Drink

A walk in the woods never seems too bad when you're starting early enough. With the birds providing accompaniment to the rising sun and the air still heavy with dew, it's easy to feel the worst part isn't the thought of a few more stolen moments under the covers, but that annoying fellow nearby who keeps singing "Here Comes the Sun" and cheerfully mangling the words.

And you set out, the mist still hanging over the trail and snaking through the ferns, your spirits are high. Who can blame you for singing every Eagles song you can think of, from "Lyin' Eyes" and "Take It Easy" on down through "Take it to the Limit."

But after a while, silence sounds nice too. So you give your throat a rest, and you keep walking. You're still feeling fine, and the hike is easy; but it's a quiet time now. A more thoughtful time.

By noon your feet are feeling tired, your legs are a little sore, and though it's not time to stop, efforts to buoy the spirit with a few Beatles songs failed. For the life of you, you don't remember the second verse to "Yellow Submarine," can't think of how "Nowhere Man" starts and every time you start on one of the classic early Beatles songs, you start wondering what it means when Paul McCartney said he was the walrus.

When it turns two o'clock, you're sweating so profusely that your shirt sticks to you like a second skin. It's the heat of the day. You keep wiping the sweat from your eyes with you arm, but it doesn't make a difference. It just keeps coming in rivulets that leave you irritated and grouch at everyone you think of.

By three in the afternoon your head hurts, your throat is too sore to sing even if you wanted, and your entire body feels jostled about, You're walking,but it's on automatic. You're no longer sweating; you're just hot, and your skin feels too tight. Your eye is starting to twitch.

And then at four, someone hands you a glass of water. It is the most wonderful thing you have ever had,

You open your mouth and pour the water in. Half of it falls on your dried and dirty shirt, but you don't care. It tastes like standing outside in rainfall, and every drop that you drink explodes inside you like sunlight. The second glass is even better than the first, and the third is like the second. Your mind sharpens, your limbs surge with vitality, and at once you want to laugh, and dance and sing.

To the thirsty, a drink of water is like health to the dying. It's a new chapter in a favorite book, a gift of laughter to the lonely.

Drink your fill.

#rethinkchurch

Lent: Journey

Was it the years, or the mileage?

It was a question the pilgrim had asked himself more times than he could count. There was the night he had fled his city, driven half-mad with a desire to leave, spurred on by the words of the stranger who had come to town: “Flee the wrath that is to come.”

He had walked through one pair of shoes after another, until finally the soles of his feet themselves were as thick as any shoe’s he had owned, so perhaps it was the miles. The road had led him ever onward, over hill and dale, through strange terrain, through strange lands, until his legs which had ached with the distance no longer ached even at the thought of what was to come. 

On the other hand, maybe it was the years for the journey had aged the pilgrim more than he had expected it would. There were the expected challenges like the sand pit, but he’d also faced horrors that had crawled out of his worst nightmares when he’d passed through the Valley of Shadows. He’d arrived at waystations as the sun had set, and slept; but when he woke in the morning the hostels were gone and in their place he was left with visions that left him with a lingering foreboding. 

And of course there had been the long and thirsty night deep in the forest with the enchantress by the well. She’d offered him a drink, if only he’d sign his name in her guest book first. 

It had been a long journey, and it still wasn’t at an end. More years awaited the pilgrim on the road, and so did the miles. His final destination, always on his mind, still seemed as distant as it did the day he’d begun. 

He knew he’d make it there, eventually, the same way he’d started. 

One step, and one day, at a time. 

#rethinkchurch.

Lent: Celebrate

Lent often is associated with foregoing pleasures and some manner of fast -- no meat on Fridays, if you're Catholic; and none on Wednesdays either, if you're a traditional Catholic -- but Sunday is always a day for celebration.

Our lives are rounded out with celebrations, and we mark those celebrations with the food that we eat.

We enter the world to celebration. We drink our mothers' milk while our families feed on meals provided by supportive friends.

Each year we celebrate our lives with cake and choice foods.

We round out our holidays and holy days with the foods that have been selected by our elders. Bitter herbs, corn on the cob and roast turkey.

And when the time comes for us to leave, our loved ones gather around to celebrate our lives with one last feast in our honor.

The life we are given is good, and we celebrate it together with good food, in good abundance. The Hebrew Bible is filled with feasts of Trumpets, tabernacles, first grains and more. The Kingdom of God is a celebration with food, music and dancing, not a joyless and spartan affair.

Fill your plate and raise your glass. Celebrate!


Copyright © 2020 by David Learn. Used with permission.


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Lent: Saved

There’s a great scene in Terry Pratchett’s “Mort” where Death, on a fishing holiday, pulls another fisherman from the river before he can drown. The man is grateful, but confused by Death’s parting words. “What did he mean by ‘Save you for later?’”

Savings aren’t just about rescuing in the here and now. They’re also about savoring hereafter. We save money and forego immediate gratification now to pay for expensive things later: a gift, a vacation, an overdue visit to a friend.

The rescue matters now: the fisherman does not drown, the money doesn’t go to waste, the opportunity is not squandered. But when there’s saving involved, you can bet there’s a longtime benefit, deep satisfaction and real enjoyment on the way.


Copyright © 2020 by David Learn. Used with permission.


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Lent: Testify

"When I use a word," Humpty Dumpty once famously told Alice, "it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less."

My daughter has taken this to heart. She insists it's not a problem, and usually it's not. People will figure out that you mean "sweatshirt" even though you keep calling it a "sweater," but if you start referring to trucks as cars, computers as elephants and left as right, you're going to sow a lot of semantic anarchy.

We testify about what we know and to what we have seen, but our testimony as only reliable as our words. Even if we're not shameless liars who let the moment's impulse trump the truth on a regular basis, the words we use can affect our testimony. Clumsy word choice, an unusual or unexpected point of view, lubricational slang, or an unfamiliar language -- they can all affect how our message is received and whether our testimony is understood.

Another thing about testimony. Whatever we offer, and how we offer it, stands as a testament about us. What does our testimony say, when we testify to what we know?


Copyright © 2020 by David Learn. Used with permission.


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Lent: Teacher

The best, most memorable teachers I’ve had generally didn’t impart knowledge.

Sometimes they’ve shared an insight or an observation, but mostly what they do is state the blindingly obvious in such a way that we’re drawn up short and realize “I never thought of it that way.” When they're really good, they don't even do that. They just ask a question, and we do the rest of the work for them.

What teachers teach is not information, nor even a new perspective, but a way of finding both. As that lesson slowly sinks in, we grow aware of how we think, and how how we think limits our thinking.

In the end the best teachers grow silent and let us learn on our own and from our fellow students and journeymen.

May your life by a lifetime of learning and a lifetime of teaching. And in the end, aren’t they the same?


Copyright © 2020 by David Learn. Used with permission.


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Lent: Spirit

The wind comes like the breath of a lion, and leaves with the sigh of a lamb. We hear it approach, and we feel it come upon us; but we can mark neither its coming nor its going.

Buds swell in the spring and soon burst into flowers and leaves, and then branches hang heavy with fruit. In the morning breath fills the lungs of us all, beast and human alike. When night comes breath departs and the flesh grows still, yet no one knows where the breath has gone.

Flesh is born of flesh and returns to dust, but spirit is born of spirit and with spirit evermore remains.

Will these bones rise and dance, and will the dust echo once more with the music of singing? The spirit blows where it will, and we must answer.


Copyright © 2020 by David Learn. Used with permission.


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Lent: Enter

Sometimes it seems like doors should come with an advisory label,

Doors mark the transition between one place and another. Cross the threshold and everything changes. You may go from a confident teen in her own space to a daughter trying to navigate a web of complicate relationships with parents and siblings; or from a confident educator to a nervous adult all alone with 20 hostile children. On this side of the door you're one thing; on the other side, you may be something entirely different.

And yet it's precisely the change waiting on the other side that makes a door so alluring. So many stories begin with the decision to go through a door. Richard Mayhew goes through a door and finds himself in an unfamiliar London with black friars, velvets, a floating market and a Down Street that leads to the Angel Islington. The Pevensie children enter a wardrobe and find themselves in a land where it's been winter for a hundred years. Bilbo walks out his front door and finds himself on a road that leads to the Lonely Mountain, self-discovery, and a ring, the least of all rings, merely a trifle that Sauron fancies.

Doors are an invitation to explore in ways that mere hallways and open spaces are not, and Opportunity waits on the other side to help us grow, to transform us, and to make us beautiful.

The door was shut, but now as you stand there, it opens and a loud Voice calls out "Enter!"

The adventure of a lifetime awaits. The choice is yours.


Copyright © 2020 by David Learn. Used with permission.


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Lent: Signs

Hundreds of years ago, ravens developed a reputation as birds of ill omen. The birds, which feast on carrion, had discovered that when armies of humans moved with horses and siege engines, they would lead the birds to a massive picnic.

The peasants on the ground would look up at the sky darkening with blackbirds and shudder as they felt death gather its cloak around the countryside. Like the ravens, they had learned to recognize the signs and knew what they meant.

Signs are shy on details but good as general indicators for what's to come. When the clouds grow heavy, we know it's going to rain; when people stop going out to eat, we know the economy is going to shrink; and when the first tender shoots of flowers burst through the mulch we know spring is near.

Red in the morning is a shepherd's warning. A cold wind from the northeast brings heavy rain. God keeps the particulars to himself, but he has painted signs of his purpose on heaven and earth and on the canvas of the human heart.

Open your eyes and open your ears. What signs do you see, and what are they telling you?


Copyright © 2020 by David Learn. Used with permission.


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Lent — Celebrate

Got a flat on the way to church today. Disappointing. It’s the sort of thing to put a Pollyanna gloss on and pretend it’s a blessing in disguise and cause to celebrate. But it’s not. It’s just annoying.

AAA sent a tow truck driver who was there in 30 minutes and knew a place that was open and could fix me up. Convenient, nice. Not a celebration.

Sundays are days of celebration, even amid the Lenten fast. God wants to eat well, to drink well, to party and to celebrate like the match that flares to life and drives back the darkness. We live! We love! God draws near! Celebrate.


Copyright © 2020 by David Learn. Used with permission.


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Lent: Serve

It's the poor one's idea of wealth to spoil himself with luxury and to fill his life with gaudy baubles; the truly wealthy spend their wealth to change the world around them for the better.

The weak envision strength as the opportunity to belittle, bully and humiliate their opponents. Those who have strength are confident in it and see no need to waste it on detractors, and use their strength instead to lift up those who can never repay them.

Those without talent boast endlessly about their accomplishments, and those with neither vision nor capacity to lead surround themselves with craven admirers who croak their praises all day long like a chorus of toads.

The most successful ventures are made possible by people whose contributions we never see. The news commentator whose show bears his name would never make it to air if someone didn't empty his wastebasket each week. The billionaire would have no corporation if it weren't for the hourly workers he's left struggling to make ends meet. The state dinner and G7 conference would have foundered without people working in the kitchen, chopping carrots, grinding pepper and plucking chickens.

Who are greatest and the most important? Don't look in the halls of status and power. Learn to look instead in the lowest of places, for the battered wife holding it together for her children, for the custodian mopping the floor everyone walks on without a second thought, for the nameless waitress who brings you pancakes and coffee in the morning.

Look for those who serve and escape notice entirely, and be dazzled by how close they are to heaven.


Copyright © 2020 by David Learn. Used with permission.


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Lent: Command

The Lent photo prompt for today is "command." We think of that as a verb, like God commands us to do something, or maybe as the command itself; i.e., "I am a jealous God. Do not put sausage links in your nose." But command is also a position or status. Jesus is in command.

In the book of Revelation, St. John of Patmos records a vision of the Lamb on a throne next to the throne of God, surrounded by four living creatures and a host of angels. There's been a lot of silliness written and spoken about this passage, but it's pretty straightforward: Jesus is on the throne at the center of the heavenly court. He is worthy to open the scroll and declare the will of God. Those four famous horsemen ride out when he wants them to.

Today popular preachers see that as Jesus enacting judgment on wicked people in the final days of the earth, but the ancients understood it differently. They saw that changes come, sometimes dramatic changes, but they're changes that come ultimately to advance God's purposes. The wicked may flourish and rule the nations for a while, but in the end it was God who placed them there and it is God who will remove them.

Things are unsettling, and it's okay to be concerned by them.

It's okay to feel the weight of what's going on, and to wonder what kind of future we're leaving to our children.

It's okay to be preoccupied by political corruption and by the cruel spite that guides our president, to be troubled by the news and the rumors that swirl around.

It's okay and it's normal to feel trepidation over a situation that seems to be getting worse and more uncertain all the time.

It's even okay to feel abandoned by people who said they were going to be there for you but then who weren't.

Don't feel bad when these things upset you. That's only normal.

But we walk through darkness and troubled waters holding the hand of a God who knows the way of old. The path is seldom easy and it isn't even always safe, but by faith we know the shore it's going to.


Copyright © 2020 by David Learn. Used with permission.


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Lent: Wilderness

There used to be a forest here. Oak and hickory grew side by side as they brushed the tips of their fingers against the underbelly of heaven, while wolves and foxes hunted their prey through the shadows of the understory. Meanwhile the river nearby hid colonies of bivalves, played host to flocks of waterfowl and schools of fish navigated its waters.

The place was alive.

That's all gone now. The river is so polluted that we have signs warning against eating the fish. There are still birds, but they no longer darken the sky for hours at a time as they fly overhead. As for raccoons, they nest in the storm sewers instead of the hollows of trees.

We call ourselves the Garden State, but our chief crop is asphalt.

In the ancient world, cities were places of strength and security. They marked the evolution of the human mind, and provided the laboratory where we rubbed shoulders with one another and together grew our languages, politics, religion and philosophy. Wilderness was that desolate expanse between here and there, where jackals and demons lived. You went there at your own risk, because no one would be there to rescue you if the monsters came.

The city still holds a lot of the allure it did in years past, but I can't help but wonder as we pass through the city, alone in our own manufactured bubbles that keep us from one another, our private cars, our earbuds that say "Leave me alone" and our smart phones that keep us from seeing each other. I wonder if we haven't replaced one wilderness with another far lonelier than any the ancients knew.


Copyright © 2020 by David Learn. Used with permission.


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The Ash Wednesday holocaust

It started that June with a spark.

The spark found a dry place to take shelter and it grew, and grew. And grew. Before long it was a raging fire, consuming deadwood, undergrowth and everything else combustible that it could find. No one worried at first. Fires are a part of the life cycle of forests, and the National Park Service had a policy of letting them burn themselves out.

But as the fire grew, people started questioning that wisdom. Homes and lives were threatened, and before long the fire had created its own weather system, sucking in air to keep itself going, and triggering lightning strikes that caused still more fires.

That summer more than 25,000 firefighters from across the United States traveled to Yellowstone to contain the fire. By the time the fire drifted quietly to sleep, lulled by the soft winter snows of November of 1988, more than 1.2 million acres in the greater Yellowstone National Park area were in ashes.

As the winter passed, fears grew that the park -- the oldest in the nation -- had been destroyed. It wasn't just a horrible forest fire. It had been a holocaust.

Ashes are the gray ruins of beauty. Stream flowers in your hair and you look as lovely as a dryad in the spring. Streak ashes on your face and you're just filthy. Grass rolls when the wind blows, and trees sway; but ashes just spread, covering everything in a fine layer of bitter.

Ashes mark the end of things. They're the funeral, the dissolution of life's chemistry, the final debasement. Oh, look, it's a pile of ashes! Was this a cedar tree, a house, or Aunt Sally? Can't tell. Move on, move on.

Except a phoenix, when its end comes, will burst into flames, crumble into ashes, and then emerge as its own chick.

Tragic ending. Beautiful beginning.

So it was at Yellowstone. As spring came in 1989 it brought with it an explosion of new life. Ground that hadn't felt sunlight in decades brought forth a new arrangement of plants, fueling an explosion of insects and the birds that ate them. Rivers teemed with fish. Wildflowers and wild grasses burst from soil laden with new depths of carbon, so that herds of grazing animals swelled in number and grew fat.

There is a lesson here.

Today is Ash Wednesday, the day we come together and recall the things that we have endured, together and as individuals.

The consuming fire was intense. It was more than we were ready for, and we thought it would destroy us. When we stood in the ashes left in its wake, we thought it had, and we wept.

Have faith. The ashes are only the beginning. In time we will find ourselves transformed and made into something more beautiful than we can remember ever being in the past.


Copyright © 2019 by David Learn. Used with permission.


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