Where the Eye Alights
Where the Eye Alights Phrases for the Forty Days of Lent
Marilyn McEntyre
William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company Grand Rapids, Michigan
Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co. 4035 Park East Court SE, Grand Rapids, Michigan 49546 www.eerdmans.com © 2021 Marilyn McEntyre All rights reserved Published 2021 Printed in the United States of America 27 26 25 24 23 22 21 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 ISBN 978-0-8028-7698-0 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: McEntyre, Marilyn Chandler, 1949– author. Title: Where the eye alights : phrases for the forty days of Lent / Marilyn McEntyre. Description: Grand Rapids, Michigan : William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2021. | Includes bibliographical references. | Summary: “Forty phrases from Scripture and poetry for meditation during each of the forty days of Lent”—Provided by publisher. Identifiers: LCCN 2020032265 | ISBN 9780802876980 (hardcover) Subjects: LCSH: Lent—Meditations. Classification: LCC BV85 .M3785 2021 | DDC 242/.34—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020032265
Unless otherwise noted, all Scripture quotations are taken from the English Standard Version of the Bible.
• Preface
Lent is a time of permission. Many of us find it hard to give ourselves permission to pause, to sit still, to reflect or meditate or pray in the midst of daily occupations— most of them very likely worthy in themselves—that fill our waking minds and propel us out of bed and on to the next thing. We need the explicit invitation the liturgical year provides to change pace, to curtail our busyness a bit, to make our times with self and God a little more spacious, a little more leisurely, and see what comes. The reflections I offer here come from a very simple practice of daily meditation on whatever has come to mind in the quiet of early morning. The practice of lectio divina teaches us to listen for the voice of the Spirit saying “Here”: here is where you will find a gift, an open door, an insight, the direction or consolation you need. Sometimes the eye alights on a mere preposition or an inconspicuous modifier, sometimes on an image or a startling verb, sometimes on a line or two—and a little shock of recognition or flicker of curiosity invites you to “come and see.” May this Lenten season be one of showings and seeings and of grace given and received every day.
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• Schedule of Readings
Begin the forty readings on Ash Wednesday, which is the first day of Lent. The Sundays in Lent are not counted in the forty days of Lent, so on Sunday you may take a day off or catch up if you have missed a day. The following table may help you keep on track. Mon.
Tues.
Week 1
Wed.
Thurs.
Fri.
Sat.
Sun.
Day 1 Day 2 Ash Wednesday
Day 3
Day 4
—
Day 7
Day 8
Day 9
Day 10
—
Week 2 Day 5
Day 6
Week 3 Day 11
Day 12 Day 13
Day 14
Day 15
Day 16
—
Week 4 Day 17
Day 18 Day 19
Day 20
Day 21 Day 22
—
Week 5 Day 23
Day 24 Day 25
Day 26
Day 27 Day 28
—
Week 6 Day 29
Day 30 Day 31
Day 32
Day 33 Day 34
— Palm Sunday
Week 7 Day 35
Day 36 Day 37
Day 38 Day 39 Day 40 — Maundy Good Holy Easter Thursday Friday Saturday Sunday
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Day 1 •
Remember that you are dust . . .
Yes, but it’s stardust. “We are all stardust,” writes William Bryant Logan in his lovely book, Dirt. “Everything is stardust.” This is not romantic metaphor. The claim comes at the beginning of a long, beautifully detailed reflection on the life of the soil, of which our bodies are also made— mostly six elements: oxygen, hydrogen, carbon, nitrogen, calcium, and phosphorus. A colleague of mine, a chemistry professor, once gave an impressive chapel talk that began, literally, with a handful of dust. He held it out for general inspection. He named the six elements of which living beings are made: oxygen, hydrogen, carbon, nitrogen, calcium, and phosphorus. “This is us,” he said. “This is the dust of which we are made—the handful of dust from which God made Adam.” To remember this is not to deny the spiritual dimension of our being, but to lead us to radical amazement. We belong to all that is—not only to human community but to
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Week 1 Ash Wednesday
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Week 1 Ash Wednesday
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the earth and to the galaxy. We are matter and energy, body and spirit. And something burns in us that does not burn away. Describing the processes by which matter turns to energy and new life is produced in a pile of decaying plant debris, Logan writes, “All that is living burns. This is the fundamental fact of nature. And Moses saw it with his two eyes, directly.” Moses sees the bush, he insists, “as it really is. He sees the bush as all bushes actually are.” Science does not dispel mystery. The best scientists I have known or read affirm that. “Behind every mystery we penetrate lies another mystery,” one of them said—a colleague whose pleasure in biology seemed very like the pleasure a poet takes in the delights and surprises of language. I have been meditating on the words I heard yesterday as ashes were “imposed” on my forehead: Remember that you are dust, and to dust you will return. A friend who was very dear to me died yesterday, only hours after those words were spoken; I carried them into the day as I imagined her quiet going, surrounded by family and flowers and lit candles, thousands of miles away. I thought of her beautiful body, her exquisite voice, her laugh, and remembered, painfully, that she was dust and was returning. But also more than dust—more, even, than stardust. I remember the final lines of a Gerard Manley Hopkins poem, where, having acknowledged the full, hard fact of mortality, that flesh falls “to the residuary worm” and “world’s wildfire” leaves “but ash,” he concludes,
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In a flash, at a trumpet crash, I am all at once what Christ is, since he was what I am, and This Jack, joke, poor potsherd, patch, matchwood, immortal diamond, Is immortal diamond.
Pure, concentrated carbon. The strongest mineral on earth. An image of what we are that is entirely consonant with the sober reminder of Ash Wednesday: dust glittering in light, splaying and sending that light back to the eye of God, who can see in us “what Christ is” and be well pleased. Week 1 Ash Wednesday
Day 2 •
Into the wilderness
Week 1 Thursday
Many of us who observe Lent as a time of reflection, spiritual renewal, fasting, and prayer enter it with hope and, perhaps, also with a few pangs of dread. Repentance and relinquishment are hard. Going into the “wilderness” is hard; those who enjoy treks and desert winds that howl under the tent flaps know this better than the rest of us. Those who observe stricter fasts than most of us—monks and nuns in monasteries, inconspicuous people who come to work with unaccustomed hunger pangs—know it, too. Lenten practices vary widely. Some young people I know take on an “electronic fast,” forfeiting screen time in favor of reading or solitary walks or simply the quiet that is often hard to come by. Some, who suffer from chronic clutter, undertake a “40 bags in 40 days” challenge, giving away one bag of stuff each day of Lent. Some give up alcohol or sugar or shopping. None of these practices produces magical results. Jesus is pretty clear on this subject: when he urges the disciples toward fasting and prayer he warns them about doing pious practices for the wrong reasons—to be seen, to feel 4
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good about their own righteousness, or out of legalism that always diverges from the way of love. When we do them rightly, it is to invite the Spirit to lead us in those “paths of righteousness” the psalmist speaks about, toward the still waters and green pastures we long for. How the Spirit leads us is an interesting matter. The Gospel writers give slightly variant accounts of how Jesus, after his baptism, was “led” by the Spirit into the wilderness. Matthew says he was “led up by the Spirit into the wilderness” (4:1), suggesting a guide who showed him the way to an appointed place of solitude and encounter with God. Mark, ever the more dramatic, writes that “the Spirit immediately drove him out into the wilderness” (1:12)—a disturbing, even shocking verb that bespeaks urgency and, possibly, a certain resistance to leaving the glorious public moment of blessing at the riverside. Luke tells us that “Jesus, full of the Holy Spirit, returned from the Jordan and was led by the Spirit in the wilderness” (4:1). By this account we are led to assume that Jesus, already at one with the Spirit, knew where to go and went willingly, and, once there, was shown what to do. While these variations might be partly attributable to translation, they are worth noticing. This is how the Spirit works: showing up in the guise of another creature—a dove, a child, a whale, a friend—and summoning, directing, nudging, driving, revealing, and, along the way, comforting and sustaining, meeting each of us in our particular seasons of life and needs, letting us, as Theodore Roethke put it, “learn by going where we have to go.”
Week 1 Thursday
Day 3 •
Watch and pray
Week 1 Friday
This little phrase from Matthew 26:41 is literally a wake-up call. Jesus says it to the disciples when he finds them sleeping through what was to be an hour of prayer. It is another of the many moments in the Gospel stories that is both convicting and slightly comical. Most of us will not find it hard to sympathize with the drowsy men who are trying so hard to be faithful and failing in such a common, human way. I think of the times I’ve had to prod myself awake during a long service—or given way to sleep and been nudged back to consciousness by a fellow worshiper who doesn’t want me to fall into his lap. The two verbs, “watch” and “pray,” have been grafted to one another for centuries in liturgy as well as Scripture, and so, when we hear them, we might sometimes hear them as a single act: watchandpray. Watching is part of praying. As we step into a quiet space, drop into a pool of silence, and open ourselves to divine presence, leaving behind distractions as well as we can manage, awareness and awakeness assume a quality of expectancy: 6
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something is about to happen. The Spirit is about to show up. We may suddenly find ourselves at peace in the midst of the day’s frustrations or even in the midst of political threats or natural disasters. Or a sorrow we’ve been suppressing might bring sudden healing tears. Or a simple sentence might give us direction. Or inexplicable, irrational joy might erupt for no apparent reason. A lot of things can happen in prayer when words leave generous, hospitable spaces for silence and when listing of needs finally gives way to listening. I like to think the “watch” part of the instruction might sound something like the way a child would call out, “Hey! Watch this!,” having made a discovery that deserves to be shared. If you watch, you’re likely to notice something you might have missed. You don’t want to miss this. As Annie Dillard reminds us, “Beauty and grace are performed whether or not we will or sense them. The least we can do is try to be there.” Watch for what unfolds or flashes or glistens or hovers or surfaces. Watching for dolphins or whales from the beach is like this: you spend a long time gazing at the swells, lulled, perhaps, until suddenly they leap or breach and you laugh, accepting and enjoying blessing. Lying out at night watching for shooting stars, as I remember doing with my daughters, is like this. The eye scans the sky, trying to maintain soft vision, watching, waiting, hoping to see the sudden, short- lived arc of fire that reminds us we are small creatures on a small planet, who, miraculously, matter in the unimaginably grand scheme of things.
Week 1 Friday
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Lent is a good time to practice this kind of watching— to cultivate in the course of ordinary days a closer attentiveness to the hints and clues and invitations the Spirit offers, rarely appearing in blinding light or throwing us from a horse, but faithfully providing assurances that we are accompanied and witnessed and, even when we fall asleep, watched.
Week 1 Friday
Day 4 •
Repentance and rest
I|was surprised recently to come upon a line in Isaiah that helped me rethink repentance: “The Holy One of Israel [says]: ‘In repentance and rest is your salvation, in quietness and trust is your strength’” (Isa. 30:15 ESV note). What surprised me was the pairing of “repentance” and “rest”—as though the two simply belonged together, as though the notion of repentance didn’t come with an unsettling “or else” clause. The term “repent” has been contaminated by caricature: it’s easy to associate it with thundering revival preachers in popular films and satirical literature for whom “Repent!” is always followed by an exclamation point and a threat. But the caricature is drawn from the lived experience of many who grew up in churches where Jesus’s invitation to a life of forgivenness and freedom had gradually, tragically given way to punitive messages that seemed to have more to do with crowd control. Jacqueline Woodson’s poignant, edgy poem “Church,” for instance, begins with a not altogether happy memory: 9
Week 1 Saturday
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On Sundays, the preacher gives everyone a chance to repent their sins. Miss Edna makes me go to church.
Week 1 Saturday
Somehow a “chance to repent” doesn’t sound to her, or to many others, like good news. But it is to Isaiah. In biblical writings, the invitation to repent often comes with a promise. The writer of Proverbs urges his son, “Repent at my rebuke! Then I will pour out my thoughts to you, I will make known to you my teachings” (1:23 NIV). And Jeremiah delivers this message from God: “If you repent, I will restore you” (15:19 NIV). Ezekiel exclaims simply, “Repent and live!” (18:32 NIV). In these and many other moments in biblical stories, repentance is presented as an opportunity—a door waiting to be opened. If you (and if we together in this over-consuming, militarized culture) turn away from what is besetting or distracting or diminishing or addicting, you will see that what awaits you is a gift: wisdom, restoration, healing, the life you’ve been missing. John the Baptist makes the promise very present: “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near” (Matt. 3:2 NIV). It’s not a promise of a happier future, but a reality already available to those who turn around, wake up, and notice. Still, it’s not altogether easy. “Teach me how to repent,” John Donne wrote, knowing as he did, an Anglican priest driven by lust and memories of ill-spent youth, that repentance isn’t once and for all, but a way of life.
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That it might be a joyful way of life seems a paradox, indeed. But repentance isn’t just sorrow for one’s wicked ways; it is a release from regret. In Paul’s second letter to the Corinthians—wayward folks apparently, who bickered and scrapped and gossiped and indulged a good bit—he speaks of “repentance that leads to salvation and leaves no regret” (2 Cor. 7:10 NIV). Repentance opens a pathway to richer, fuller life—the life you were meant to lead. Regret keeps you stuck. And repentance, to return to Isaiah, allows you to rest. I think of the many times I’ve heard—and said—some version of “I’m wrestling with . . .” “I’m struggling with . . .” “I’m working on . . .” changing a habit, coming to terms with self-defeating patterns, releasing resentments or guilt or old confusions. Repentance allows us to rest in forgiveness, regroup, and, rather than wrestling, float for a while, upheld while we learn to swim in the current, or walk unburdened, or do a dance of deliverance, day by day releasing the past and entering fully, with an open heart, into the present where an open heart is waiting to receive us.
Week 1 Saturday
Day 5 •
Broader than the measures of the mind
Week 2 Monday
I|find these words arresting every time I see them. They come from an 1862 hymn by Frederick William Faber. The whole line is a striking reminder: “For the love of God is broader than the measures of the mind.” My brother and his friends, who spend their time at play in the fields of astronomy and math and astrophysics, have broad minds, indeed; they seem to be able to think in light-years and powers of ten without blowing a circuit. They’re comfortable with black holes and string theory and the notion of eleven known dimensions. But there are places even their copious minds can’t go. There, I suppose, is where mystics dwell—at the outer edge of what can be apprehended by any human instrument or told in any human language— where even metaphors fail. I find the idea of the unimaginable oddly comforting. Out there, where imagination stops (mine somewhere this side of the boundary of an expanding universe), what one 12
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physicist called “radical amazement” begins. If we even entertain the idea that the heart of the Creator encompasses all that is, the idea that love is that big, it becomes impossible not to imagine also that every impediment to that love will disappear in the deep space of that heart. One of the books that kept me engaged with matters of faith in high school, where other enticements gave church some serious competition, was J. B. Phillips’s Your God Is Too Small. He intended it as “A Guide for Believers and Skeptics Alike.” Both audiences, he assumed, might be suffering from pinched, diminishing, and diminished notions of a punitive, demanding, exclusionary, antiquated, simplistically personified God it would be impossible for an intelligent person really to worship. “Bigger than I am” is a place to start. It may not quite get us to awe, but it can nudge us in that direction. St. Ignatius knew the imagination could help guide us to the edge where faith takes over, so he made room for imagination in his “Exercises.” David Fleming, SJ, writes of him, “The quality of thought that drove his spiritual life was his remarkable imagination.” Less bounded than rationality, imagination can go anywhere, try out “what ifs” and thought experiments, and play. A phrase like “broader than the measures of the mind” invites us to imagine: How big would that be? I don’t know a child who hasn’t at some point stretched out both arms as wide as possible to try to get at what it means to say, “I love you this much.” A boyfriend of my youth drew a stick figure
Week 2 Monday
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with arms out to the edge of the page for that purpose once, and I kept that letter long after the romance gave way to adult life, just for its sweet effort to imagine such love. If we don’t imagine such love, something in us stops growing and reaching toward the only light that can penetrate the looming darkness of this ailing planet. As we daily witness how minds can be manipulated and confused by half-truths and fears fed by calculated falsehood, what lies beyond the measures of the mind may be exactly where we find what we need to see us through. Week 2 Monday