May God richly bless you and yours as we celebrate the feast of Pascha (Easter). Christ is Risen!

It is the 11th hour and so much has yet to begin even as too little has been completed. Fast rushing time has done it’s work and this moment, this Lent, is fading away as soon as it has started. What has been done? What has been changed? How is the world, and myself for that matter, more like its future and less like its past?

In truth the time, this Lent, has been filled with worry and work and almost everything that is not of either its law or spirit. Spring has come and yet winter has kept its strong grip. Resolution, as small as it was, has become fatigue, and fatigue has birthed carelessness. Sinner I entered, sinner I remain.

Yet there are four days left and though they cannot replace the others or the things missing they are still four days. Finish well, finish well, finish well. Perhaps there is still time to find a garment presentable enough for the feast. Perhaps there is still time to find a way into the door, or at least to see through its window. Time is merciless but God is merciful and perhaps if I cannot stand in the light I can at least stand in the shadows that are still better than darkness.

I am a sinner that wants to be holy. I am sick and wish to be well. I speak boldly and yet am often afraid. I believe, Lord help me in my unbelief. Perhaps this is enough, in this 11th hour. I have nothing else to offer, but I will try.

Palm Sunday the people had it right, perhaps for the very first time. Jesus was indeed the “Son of David”, the Messiah. They were right to cry out to him for salvation, but in the fervor of the moment they lost the point. The salvation they needed was not external to them, the changing of rulers, a hope in some person alone, but a change in themselves. The salvation Christ offered was more profound than the salvation of politicians. It was the total transformation of the world beginning with the total transformation of the person. The revolution was to begin within.

St. Mary of Egypt Sunday
2010

We live, for the most part, in an unexamined state. In the affairs of life few of us ever have much time, frankly, to look at our lives with any kind of clarity at all and certainly not with the pure vision that only God possesses.

We see ourselves basically in shadows, blurred images, a face we see in the mirror for a few minutes and then it is gone. For the most part the world is simply filled with varieties of noise, a hundred things trying to get our attention at any one minute and we hardly pay attention to any of it, or to ourselves.

For the most part its only a crisis of some kind that forces the potential for reflection on our lives. When a somber doctor says “It’s cancer, and we’ll do the best we can”, or you take the long walk out of the office with your desk in a cardboard box there is suddenly space for clarity.

In the case of St. Mary of Egypt, whose Sunday we are calling to mind, it came at the door of a church. In a moment she saw the trajectory of her life in all its infamy and pain and in that moment the Holy Spirit spoke to her about her life, her sins, her potential future, and everything else that really mattered.

Her response to this moment of insight was tears and the complete renunciation of her self in the embrace of God. It was in that moment that the woman who had given herself to everyone understood that only God finally mattered and every hunger would find its satisfaction with Him. It was in that moment when she stepped away from death into life.

The season of Lent is quickly coming to an end and with it the invitation to self examination and repentance. The truth is that it can be a terrifying thing to stand naked and exposed before God with the whole of our lives subjected to His vision. For the most part we’re glad to let the business of life keep us from taking a truthful and honest look at ourselves. Embarrassment, pain, a fear of the unknown, all of this and more prevents us from coming to God with a clear perspective of who we are.

Yet just as a doctor needs total truth from us in order to properly diagnose and treat our illnesses so we, too, need complete honesty about ourselves before God as the first step to curing the dark sicknesses of our soul. And while God, in His mercy may allow a crisis to help focus on the true state of things we can also willingly engage in this process choosing to live a life of complete honesty towards God each day.

The remarkable thing, of course, is that our fears in these things are groundless. We may think that somehow we are hiding from God, that His vision of us can be blurred or distorted like our own. Such is not the case. Admit it or not God knows us to the depths of our being. God knows us better then we know ourselves. Nothing is hidden. When we go to confession we tell God nothing new.

Yet it is precisely at the moment that we expose every hidden corner of ourselves to God that we discover love greater then we could possibly imagine. In one moment St. Mary of Egypt, who had been filled with the insatiable desire for men, came to her senses and her troubled heart, her arms so often full of empty love, came to know the love that endures and cannot be quenched. Her wandering through life ended and she was filled with pure, clear, and holy purpose.

While there is still time in Lent we can ask God for this great gift, to see our lives as they truly are, to be exposed in every hidden corner and yet in doing so to begin the healing we crave, the grace we need, and the love that never fades. There is but a week before Holy Week yet so much good is still possible if we are willing to say “Here I am, God, take everything I am, give me eyes to see what is true and right and good, eyes to see you and see myself with clarity, and like St. Mary of Egypt heal this broken sinner who stands before the doors of your temple seeking what I lost in Eden so long ago.”

I stand in your fire
but remain unconsumed
and for the moment the world is still.
Only the words matter, as old as time,
offered for the world and bright with your presence.
How dark the night can be, and yet how precious this moment,
this day, this time when eternity is in my hand and I
stand in the flames of forever
but remain unconsumed.