From the Rector

Dear Friends in Christ,

This coming Sunday marks the First Sunday in Lent. We begin a season focused not so much on the mistakes or failures of our past but in the shape of our hope for the future.

It is easy to think of Lent as a time for bewailing and lamenting—and there is certainly some of that. But for it to stop there becomes a kind of self-obsessed indulgence. For that repentance to become something more it must take a future-focus.

If we’ve failed then what will success, to employ a very American word, look like in our relationship with God, with our neighbor, and with one another?

If we’ve sinned—and we would not be human if we haven’t—then what will holiness look like in the future?

If we’ve fallen then what will standing up look like?

Lent is not a time when we will, by force of determination and perfection of effort, earn more love from God. God is profligate with that love regardless of our efforts—and perhaps despite them! Lent may be a time, though, for us to reflect on the distance we feel, through our sins and failures, between us and God.

It’s a distance that is real but only as real as any other temptation. It’s tempting to believe that God is distant because a near God, a God in whom we live and move and have our being, is a God who will change us. And we do not like to change.

What might it look like, this Lent, to focus on the nearness of God and to let that nearness be our future? This may be our work of repentance this Lent: to repent of our forgetfulness. We forget the nearness of God and let our hearts and minds and souls wander too far from whom we were made to be.

A near God will challenge us to forgive more quickly, heal more readily, be compassionate more liberally, take offense less heatedly, and so much more. A near God soothes our raging pride with his gentle love. And in that tames our wandering soul that we might truly focus on a future lived as close to him as our next breath and last heartbeat.

May this Lent be a time to plan, shape, and pray for the future God has always had in store for us no matter our past.

Yours in Christ,

—Fr Robert