Dear All of Us,
Look Out!!
Here comes Lent.
As Yogi Berra used to say:
"It's Deja Vu Again"
only with this Lent it's
Deja Vu Again and Again and Again and Still!!
In too many ways Lent-20 has lingered and lasted right into the now of Lent-21.
It shows no sign it's ready to wrap up in the customary forty days either.
An elongated, unending span dealing with the dark and difficult.
A rough time and reckoning.
As the Jewish expression has it "Enough already!!"
Enough, for sure.
Already, not a chance.
We are living our spiritual lives out here on the street of everyday life
traversing a painfully long stretch of Lent
- facing the dark, seeking the light
- dealing with the the difficult, the disappointing, the dreadful.
- seeing disorder and destruction, seeking a way forward and better
- facing all sorts of death and longing for resurrection and life
( be it body, spirit, psyche, social, cultural, political, ethical, religious)
- review, reflection, repentance, reform, renewal
For a year and counting it's been Lent on steroids:
- seeing our sin, personal and social, and it's horrid consequence
- coming or failing to come to terms with that
- puzzling why pain
- a year of tribulation and trial, discontent and "dis-ease"
- fiction posturing as fact, lies camouflaging as truth
sinister political and media manipulation and misinformation,
an "altered state of consciousness" that dupes and dopes millions,
precipitates and inflicts violence on the "other"
- rampant, rabid efforts to foul the most monitored, safe, certified,
positively adjudicated election in the entire history of this threatened republic
- COVID-19 moving and mutating in all sorts of ways and continuing
right through 2020 and now 2021, and that with a vengeance,
killing multitudes and making millions ill,
frustrating healthy human contact and connection
(family, friends, church, education, sports, the arts ),
throngs thrown out of work and businesses into financial peril
- racism outed ever more making it distressingly obvious that
black lives really don't matter to too many
- white supremacists darkening democracy
- thugs rape our Capital causing five deaths and life scares on our nation
- politicians on principle pause
- lots of religious leaders - how much spiritual leading and living?
- confinements of all sorts, loss of control, frustrations, anxiety,
confusions, disorientation, spirits stressed and arid.
In this long, long Lent there was/is no need to pick a Lenten sacrifice.
Oh, to just be able to give up candy or a glass of wine at supper for Lent!
No way!
Speaking of "way", a major model for Lent is the "way" the Chosen People
made their way from slavery to freedom and just kept losing their way.
Rather than follow the GPS God gave, they time and too many
went the wrong way, took dead ends and short cuts that kept them
going nowhere fast for forty years. That routing got them
in more than a few rough spots and caused them pain and peril.
A stubborn and "stiff necked people" that got stiffed
trying to dictate direction, to fashion an alternate reality.
So how about us?
What needs rethink and repentance in our spiritual lives?
As individuals and as a people
- why are we where we are?
- what wrongs and directions need righting?
- what can we learn from our experience and pain?
- what personal and communal "Golden Calves" need to be toppled
and melted to nothingness?
- what false leaders and leads need to be banished?
- what degree of honest "re -penance" is there?
- how much desire is there for redirection to the real and right?
- what are attitudinal and action changes forward?
- what the promise possible?
Let's give all that a long, long
Lent Look
for the next forty days and nights
(at least).
God help us!
John frank
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A for real Welcome to our first time visitors.
It's tough stuff here this week for sure.
Please do come back, though.
We need to admit the dark
and we sure can find the light.
"frankly speaking"
spirituality for the street
is posted by mid-day Thursdays
east coast USA time
johnfrankshares.blogspot.com
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May our plea and prayer be that of the blind man to Jesus:
" I want to see."
Luke 18:41
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