Lent and Life: The Uphill Rut

Yesterday Kathy and I took a walk along a beautifully snowy ravine, its stream cut deep and lined by century-old willow, cedar and redwood trees, too big to get your arms around. While we walked, I mostly looked at the ground, the soft, packed white path of boot prints of other walkers. I was lost in my thoughts of the limbo of my life leading up to surgery, of our recent financial planning conversation and my desire to take a better look at our budget, of my desire to get back home to my workshop. Kathy, walking in front of me, was all eyes, stopping frequently to photograph the deep snow on the rolling earth and the old trees clinging to it. And as she looked at the trees, she would do something that I have seen her do again and again. She would walk from the path into the deep snow to reach out and touch the trees. She would place her hand flat on it like she might on the shoulder of a friend or the head of a child, pressed skin to skin, touching. She was, I reflected, in the kingdom of God, where things are seen as of value in themselves, and people too.

It struck me this morning that it FEELS like Lent to me, kind of a pain. I write early in the morning, well before dawn, when my mind is clear except for this writing. I waken with this and only this on my mind and generally what ends up on this blog occurs to me as a spark of thought, blown from an ember of idea somewhere in my subconscious where a fire burned sometime. I blow, waking, on that spark, and it ignites my consciousness, moves my feet to the floor and my fingers to the keyboard. There is a very free passion to it, going where this spark blows, where the path of the fire takes me. But we are following not this butterfly of carefree imagination, but the slowing footsteps of a man two millennia ago who loved with such insistence in the face of power that he was killed for it.
Why was it this particular morning that I wakened with a sense of the uphill slope of this walk? Perhaps it was reflecting on yesterday’s reckoning that 1/3 of the journey is behind us, and 2/3 still to go. Perhaps it was that in my mind I had the number 40 – 40 days in the desert; this Lent is actually a 47 day trip, and I need to recalibrate my endurance. But I think too that it was because I’ve committed myself to write today about the landowner in this Sunday’s Good Story. Why would Jesus, knowing that we was moving toward a confrontation with the authorities, tell this story, about a landowner that wanted to cut down a barren tree and a gardener who wanted just one more year to try to save it? I suspect that it was just this kind of talk that got him in trouble. In the kingdom of Herod, under the power of Rome, practicality rules; in the kingdom of God, mercy reigns.  Today we consider the way of the world. We put on the cloak of power and become the landowner, or we dare to be the tree he wants to have cut down. Would you rather be the landowner or the tree? Would you rather be killer or killed? Maybe I’m being too radical about this. Maybe it’s just a matter of practicality. The landowner had a product to grow, a business to run. We wasn’t about trees, he was about fruit, about product.

We are walking with Jesus for these next 31 days, along a slope that will increase as he challenges the landowners to consider more than product, and as they look at him as a madman who steps off the path of convention to place his hand on their trees. Consider today how we are driven by practicality to keep our eyes on the footprints of those who have cut this rut we are in, this life of productivity and yield. Consider how we make this rut deeper by blindly following it. In your Examen tonight, recall the times today when you will have forgotten the value of those around you, and ignoring the value of yourself. Notice how you feel.

Tomorrow things will be looking up as we consider the gardener and the tree.