As Lent rolled in last week, I shared with colleagues that I just didn’t have the energy to give anything up this year. In response, my friend Terra Winston wrote back these three simple sentences that shook something loose inside me:

Sabbath is a good practice as well. If you have the energy for it, it might be what is called for this season. No pressure, just a thought.

She went on to share with me her experience of a year when she felt at the end of her rope and was praying about how to continue in the ministry she was involved in. “What I did was make myself carve out time each Saturday to spend time reading, hiking or just sitting,” she said. “The difference was during these times I did it with a sense of Lent and a focus on God in my heart.”

I was immediately drawn to her proposal of Sabbath as Lenten practice. Since high school, when I was introduce to the Lent, I’ve known it largely in terms of giving up something that is desirable: meat, sugar or chocolate. However the underlying message is one of refocusing. So for the last two Saturdays, I’ve followed Terra’s suggestion in carving out a desirable time in the spirit of Lent—mostly reading and sitting quietly outside. It has created a healing and nurturing space for me. It fits with what Fr. Shannon Kearns calls a “body honoring practice” in an article on Lent for queertheology.com:

What if, instead of giving something up that you love, you give up something that makes you feel bad? What if, instead of giving up Twitter or Facebook you use those tools to connect with people who make you feel like you have community? What if, instead of berating yourself for what you need to change, you focus on the things you do well and concentrate on doing them even better? What if you slow down, take time, go deeper? Practice self care, get to know and love your body, live into resurrection.

My hope, as I commit to this weekly practice, is to dip into the contemplative stream that often eludes me in the midst of my doing. This is a pond in which I have only dipped the end of my little toe into and so, in trying to put words to it, I will draw on wisdom from others whose words have spoken to me in this time.

Rock in the woods

Bob Sabath is a long time tech worker at Sojourners magazine also described as “resident contemplative.” In the February issue of the magazine, he interviewed the Rev. Dr. Cynthia Bourgeault, a traveling mystic and author of eight books on the Christian spiritual life. He asked her this question:

Sabath: What would you say to Christian social justice activists who see themselves primarily concerned with faith and action, who perhaps have had a difficult time working with the inner journey and almost see it as getting in the way?

Bourgeault: I’d say come back and see me in 15 years. I don’t think anybody ever becomes a prophet thinking that they may be wrong and the rest of the world is right. There’s this real sense that, by virtue of my mantle as a “prophet,” I have the moral high ground. I see what’s wrong. I have to take it on myself to speak up about the ills and the excesses. Along with that, from the point of view of that mesoteric level, is identification. I’m very bound up in the energy of my role. I’m actually using that role as a source of motivation and that creates identification, which is a violence in its own right. It also quickly lands a person in burnout and anger, which are the basic shadow sides of social action. It’s very hard for people to understand how to work like a Gandhi, like a Dag Hammarskjöld, or even like Jesus. The very zeal that impels us toward action also fatally skews it.

As I prepare to transition out of a full-time role with Christian Peacemaker Teams this summer, I am aware how much I am “bound up in the energy of my role.” I am sitting with the image of letting go and of release.

In my friend Jeremy John’s article, “Lent: Falling in Love With the Ordinary” he writes about his own experience of moving into work for peace and justice:

You see, human rights offered me an opportunity to square off against real evil, allowing me to live out my hero dreams, like during the Occupy movement, or when I was in prison to close the School of the Americas. Times when I felt the Holy Spirit like a fire in my bones. Times when it seemed that the nonviolent lamb marched to war with the principalities and powers that chain the earth in decay and bondage and sets yokes on the poor. It’s easy to feel like you’re living out the Gospel when you’re in prison, sleeping outside in the winter, or blocking a bank from seizing someone’s home.

Jeremy goes on to ask what sustains us through the ordinary time, between the “Holy Spirit like a fire” moments. This is a similar challenge from Sr. Anne Montgomery that spoke to me at the beginning of this time of increased responsibility: “Instead, we say we are responsible for our way of life, and for far more than one action with no follow-up.” As this time draws to an end for me, I find myself moving from answers to questions.

I find hope in the way these four threads of wisdom dovetail with my own inner work. I find hope in knowing that others have walked these paths before. I find hope that, in Fr. Richard Rohr’s words, we are “already participating in something very good, in spite of our best efforts to deny it or avoid it.”