Dear Good Samaritans,

Like so many things in the spiritual life, Lent is not so much a destination as it is a journey. On Ash Wednesday we started out, possibly gung-ho even to try on something new or let go of something old. I know that I did. But on Sunday we will be at the 3rd Sunday in Lent. I will admit that my Sabbath practice is far from perfect. I have not started exactly at sunset. I have not put down my phone or my computer (or other obligations) entirely on Saturday. It is a work in progress. However, I still dream of a time when it is reality. When it comes as easily as waking up or saying the Our Father. But little by little, day by day, I am getting there.

It is hard to start something new or give up something engrained. It changes a pattern. I will also be the first to say that I am as guilty as anyone in wanting the skip the hard parts. I want to jump to the end. To be good at whatever it is without the practice. But that’s not actually how anything works. I am sure my parents would have loved it if I had been able to pick up an oboe and was immediately ready for the symphony. They had to listen to the squeaks and the squawks that I made for a LONG time before I could make beautiful music. It is all part of the process though. As cliché as it might be, the end is not the destination, but the journey or process to get there is.

Would I skip to the end and be a flawless, Sabbath-keeper? A brilliant oboist? Perhaps. but I wonder what I would have missed on the way. The hiccups and setbacks are part of the path.

So as we approach this third Sunday in Lent, give yourself grace if you haven’t perfected your Lenten practice. For that matter give yourself grace if you haven’t even started a Lenten practice! Or if you are perfect at it already. No matter what you do, God loves us and offers us grace. And I have absolutely no doubt that God is happy for whatever it is we can do when we can do it.

I was reminded this week of a lovely prayer by one of my favorite theologians, the late French Jesuit priest and paleontologist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, SJ. It is titled Patient Trust.

Above all, trust in the slow work of God.
We are quite naturally impatient in everything to reach the end without delay.
We should like to skip the intermediate stages.
We are impatient of being on the way to something unknown, something new.

And yet it is the law of all progress
that it is made by passing through some stages of instability—
and that it may take a very long time.

And so I think it is with you;
your ideas mature gradually—let them grow,
let them shape themselves, without undue haste.
Don’t try to force them on,
as though you could be today what time
(that is to say, grace and circumstances acting on your own good will)
will make of you tomorrow.

Only God could say what this new spirit
gradually forming within you will be.
Give Our Lord the benefit of believing
that his hand is leading you,
and accept the anxiety of feeling yourself
in suspense and incomplete.

Amen. A Lenten prayer if ever I heard one. It’s slow. It’s a process. Stick with it. It will change you.

Peace to you my friends!