This time of chaos and undoing has elicited lots of feelings in many of us. They are not all on the negative side of the balance, these feelings, but those that are run the gamut from dread to fury and back again. Our Lenten spiritual practices and disciplines could not come at a better time—not because such commitments dismiss our broken hearts or magically repair them, but because they place our distress in the context of Jesus Christ.
It can be difficult to turn our reactions to what we are experiencing in the world over to the Holy Spirit. Sometimes we need reminders about the natural, cumulative consequences of not doing so. To that end, I share this poem by Devon Balwit, titled What the Fall Taught Me:
I once believed I could hate intermittently,
an incandescence I could turn on and off
with the will or guide with the pressure
of my knees or with reins woven
from the clear demands of the moment.I believed hatred could be trained,
that it could heel beside me, unmuzzled
and awaiting command, and would
not suddenly lash out at passing strangers
driven by ancestral hungers.At the very least, I believed I’d summoned
my hatred into being as a rational act,
rather than playing dumb host to its cordyceps
matting in and maddening me until I behaved
like any other similarly infected.
Lenten blessings,
