Inner Earth
Dear Friends,
As I drove home last night after our evening Ash Wednesday service, reflecting on what moved me the most, I couldn’t help but picture the faces of those who came forward to the altar for ashes. Not before, but after those ashes were imposed. For some reason this year, our ashes seemed to have a will of their own and weren’t content simply remaining on foreheads in the shape of a cross, but migrating to the eyelashes, the cheeks, the chins of the trusting parishioners who received them. Those ashes were animated, I thought to myself. But isn’t that just what we are? Animated Earth?
I was reminded of a quote I came across years ago from Joan Sauro’s book Whole Earth Meditation:
The Spirit of God breathes everywhere within you, just as in the beginning, filling light place and dark…green earth and dry…. God’s love grows, fullness upon fullness, where you crumble enough to give what is most dear. Your earth.
Since then, I have been wondering, what is my earth? What is the terrain that formed me? What are the stories that give it its unique character and consistency, not only my own stories but the layers of stories of those who have gone before me and whose stories have become part of mine. How about you? What landscape has shaped and formed you, and the contours you carry inside?
In the word of artist and pastor Jan Richardson, “We enter Lent to enter our own earth, to make a pilgrimage into our own terrain. We move into this season to look at our life anew, to consider what has formed us, where we have come from, what we are carrying within us.”
This year during our Wednesday evening programming, “Our Lives, Our Legacies,” we will be gathering with the parishioners of St. Peter’s Episcopal Church to look at the layers of stories that inhabit the shared landscape of our two congregations. We will listen to video interviews representing five generations of memories, imaginings, dreams, as well as challenges and losses and periods of deprivation. And as we do, I am hoping that we can pay attention to what feels fallow or empty, where there is growth and greenness, what sources of sustenance lie within us, where we find our inner earth crumbling to reveal something new. I am hoping we can discover something of the God who meets us in every layer of our life.
As this season begins, what other ways might God be inviting you into the landscape that inhabits you? Is there a space within your soul that needs your attention, your compassion, your prayer? How might it be to open that space to the presence of Christ who knows what it means to enter a difficult terrain, and who found sustenance and angels even there?
In Christ,
Amelie
