Lent Dance: A Turning Back, A Turning Toward

Wednesday, 17 February, marks Ash Wednesday, when the Season of Lent begins for Christians. What makes Ash Wednesday and Lent significant, year after year?

A Christian Response

I engage in daily prayer and meditation. Over dozens of years, a variety of spiritual practices have, at one time or another, given life, been shed, and occasionally re-embraced. A consistent thread is to make deliberate time periods for intentional reflection and turning toward God. Why is this important? In this time of my life I want to be a whole person, delightfully alive, and hallowed into radical authenticity and vivid presence. I know that God unabashedly loves me—and everyone who I desire to serve with mutuality, friendship, and compassionate care. I want to participate as fully as I can in God’s ongoing love affair with humanity and all of the cosmos.

Spirituality is not a separate part of who I am every day—it is embodied and experienced through my senses and life particulars. I welcome the defined time period of Lent to turn to God with my whole self. This turning is ultimately toward the world.

An Olympic Story

Tonight I watched Olympic figure skating, pondered Lent, and allowed the Hebrew Scripture, “Return to me with your whole heart” (Jl 2:12) to glide within me. I looked at ice dancers become grace in motion—turning, spinning, twirling, arching, moving towards, away, tucking and reaching. I visually experienced the spiritual journey. Surely it encompasses all these moves. We are not meant to be spectators in life! We are invited to engage, participate, train, fall, glide, spin, embrace, and turn towards one another and God. Music dances through our soul, as rhythm glides into expression in our body and daily life.

Spiritual Guidance

Ash Wednesday and Lent invite a fresh turning—or return—to God’s embrace. As much as each of us is on a solitary journey, it is also communal. Meeting with a spiritual director can encourage genuine seeking and conversion. During spiritual direction we are accompanied in our turning to God with our whole heart, broken heart, or dancing heart.

Will you join me in turning toward spiritual practice, a daily discipline, and a radical acceptance of wholeness and connection with all of creation? Lent can spring the frozen places in our heart and actions, thaw our resistance to compassionate love, and grow our sacred dance with the Beloved.

If you are seeking a spiritual director to accompany you, click here to discover good questions and spiritual directors to interview through the online, searchable: Seek and Find: A Worldwide Resource Guide of Available Spiritual Directors.

Note: I wrote this post for my work with Spiritual Directors International. It is on the SDI blog, and titled Lent Dance: A Turning Back, A Turning Toward by Pegge Bernecker.

Spring Growth During Lent

Spring Growth During Lent Posted by PeggeBernecker at 3/27/2009 3:10 PM CDT    http://www.chron.com/channel/houstonbelief/commons/searching.html

Spring Growth during Lent

When I hear the word “Lent” I initially think of Christianity, forty days, and a time of spiritual discipline and purification. However, do you know that the word “Lent” also means “spring?” It can be valuable to notice the significance of “spring” in terms of spiritual discipline and practice.

If you were given forty days to practice “springing” something new in your life, what would that be? Imagine how your life might feel and look if … (pause to take a minute to think about this, right now!)

Picture what you want to bud or grow alive in you. Ponder: “what can I move towards?” instead of a slightly restrictive quest of “what can I give up?” While the process of giving something up is good, it can be a limiting or contracting way of thinking, acting, and being. Give yourself permission to believe in expansion and possibility. Let this be the foundation for your action.

So, I ask myself—and you—this question: What needs to shift in me if I want to think, act, and love in a way that is healthy and life-giving for myself and the people who encounter me? In other words, “what characteristics and behaviors do I hold as an ideal, that I want to move towards?” Asking this question shifts our intention and motivation, enabling permanent, significant change beyond forty days.

You might have an easy time with this reflection, and incorporate guidance from an existing prayer practice or spiritual discipline. You may have a relationship with God, the Holy One, or the Divine that guides you in knowing what needs to spring alive in you. Maybe you seek a relationship with the transcendent other and that in itself is what springs alive in you, needing attention. Perhaps at this time in your life you desire to live a life of significance and meaning—within your fullest human potential—without a relationship with God, organized religion, or another community of spiritual practice. Wherever this time of your life finds you, it is always good to occasionally stop, access, evaluate, and act anew.

Will you give yourself permission to grow new life through your discipline, prayer, and spiritual practice? How will your Lenten fast plant seeds for the fifty day Christian Easter season feast? Although only two weeks remain in the traditional Lenten season, what needs to thaw and break apart so new life can spring alive in you, bringing wholeness and healing to the world you inhabit?