Two Shoes and a Ring

Perhaps you notice that we’ve changed what we’ve put on for Lent – not sackcloth and ashes, but two shoes and a ring. We’ve defined Lent as a time of unwrinkling, returning to our whole-iest selves, by engaging our desire and our will within the sacredness of the Jesus story.

We’ve begun to break in this new pair of shoes: a nightly Examen (looking back at the experiences of the day to recall those when we felt closest to our most authentic selves, when our native humanity was moved) and Entering the Story, coming to our senses inside the Good Story/Gospel and experiencing it as our own. And finally, we look at Fasting not as penitential sackcloth and ashes, but as a ring that we wear as a reminder of relationship.
Three months ago when I learned of my need for heart surgery, I removed the wedding ring that I had worn every day for the past 40 years, 14,500 days. Assumed that I would have the operation quickly, I recalled a minor operation I had had ten years ago, and the trouble I had removing that ring. I had feared that they would need to settle on their last resort, cutting it off with a metal scissors that would make easy work of the soft gold. For several weeks after removing it I felt its absence constantly. The adjacent fingers on my left hand would feel its absence. The depression that it had formed in my dark, calloused skin was soft and pale to my touch and my sight. And even washing my hands was different, for the lack of the feel of that ring. I thought of the loss of what that ring symbolized, my life with Kathy, and even in the fleeting moment I would imagine losing not the ring, but HER, tears would immediately come to my eyes. I look forward to getting through the operation in a month or two and putting that ring back on, and being reminded by it that I DO have Kathy, and I AM alive.
So we have the two shoes of the Examen and Entering the Story to carry us up this sloping journey, day by day. And we wear the ring of Fasting that reminds us that we have committed ourselves to this relationship with the wholeness within ourselves, the Holiness that is our name written on the heart of God.

When you hear or read the Good Story of the Landowner and the Gardener and the Barren Tree tomorrow (the 3rd Sunday of Lent), you have the opportunity to hear it as a familiar story, a story that is like family to you, that embraces you from inside yourself, that speaks to you from your memory, and not from your mind. Your having Entered the Story again and again this past week and found echoes of its meaning in your nightly Examen – in the experiences that moved you this week as tree, as landowner, as gardener – will enfold you.

And now I realize that the forty-seven day length of this Lent, this lengthening past the nominal 40, is good news. If you, like I, have done less of this than you had hoped, we have four more weeks to try it. Next week’s Good Story is among the most beautiful – the story of the Prodigal Son. Put on your shoes and your ring; this part of the journey can change your life forever.

Enjoy your week-end. Tomorrow – the gift of the sudden, the gift of the gradual.

John
 


FreeLemonadeStand by John J. Daniels is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.