Spiritual Ruminations: a map and a desert…

Lent is on the horizon, like a vast desert, and I am standing at its border.

Lent is a season of penitence, growth, longing, striving, waiting, sitting, listening, challenging, giving, refraining, stopping, praying, cleaning, changing, transforming.

You can take your pick of these descriptors. What catches your attention?

I ponder these ideas and start every Lent with a grand plan formed by one or more of them. That plan always changes along the way. Sometimes it is simply demolished.

The map is torn away in the storm and I am left standing in the wild, grit in my orifices, blind and deaf to my best intentions.

Left lost and naked, I have the choice to see myself, to engage with God. Growth and change– conversion–now has room to dance the waltz of transformation.

And that is the ultimate Lent scheme.

So here I am, hours away from Fat Tuesday, and a bit longer until…