“The voice of Lent is the cry to become new again, to live on newly no matter what our life has been like until now and to live fully.”
-Sister Joan Chittister
celtic vision dingle peninsula, ireland
© erin dunigan 2003
“Clearly the voice of Lent is not a dour one. It is a call to remember who we are and where we have come from and why.”
– Sister Joan Chittister
holy place Sea of Galilee, Israel
© erin dunigan 2006
Clearly also this photo is not going to win any awards for beauty – but I took it not for beauty’s sake, but because I was intrigued by its message – somehow a ‘holy place’ means no dogs, no cigarettes, no guns and no short clothing – but would chewing gum be okay? Would eating a cheeseburger be okay?
Of course I realize the need for ‘respect’ in life and in space – and especially in space that has been so incredibly significant to so many of the worlds people for so long.
But I think we also miss something when we assume that a ‘holy place’ is somehow set apart or cut off from the ‘non-holy places’ in life. The word holy does mean ‘set apart’ – so it is not hard to see how this idea came to be. But if the Spirit of God is at work in the world, breathing it into being, sustaining it, renewing it, then can’t any place be a holy place? Shouldn’t we always be prepared for, be mindful of, the holy place that is in our very midst?
The season of Lent offers us such a ‘holy place’ within time. Set apart. And present. Both.
A time to remember who we are and where we have come from and why.
Tagged 40days, Cuaresma, holy place, holy time, Lent, sea of galilee, set apart, Sister Joan Chittister, thin place
devotion Sea of Galilee, Israel
© erin dunigan 2005
“Ash Wednesday…is a continuing cry across the centuries that life is transient, that change is urgent. We don’t have enough time to waste time on nothingness. We need to repent our dillydallying on the road to God. We need to regret the time we’ve spent playing with dangerous distractions and empty diversions along the way. We need to repent of our senseless excesses and our excursions into sin, our breaches of justice, our failures of honesty, our estrangement from God, our savorings of excess, our absorbing self-gratifications, one infantile addiction, one creature craving another. We need to get back in touch with our souls.
Ash Wednesday confronts us with what we have become and prods us to do better. Indeed, Lent, we learn, is not about abnegation, about denying ourselves for the sake of denying ourselves. It is about much more than that. It is about opening our hearts one more time to the Word of God in the hope that, this time, hearing it anew, we might allow ourselves to become new as a result of it. It is about our rising to the full stature of human reflection and, as a result, accepting the challenge to become fully alive, fully human…”
-Sister Joan Chittister
This year Lent, the season preceeding Easter, begins on Wednesday February 13th. #Rethinkchurch, out of the Methodist Church, has issued an interesting challenge – post a photo a day, around the theme for that day.
I decided to try it.
edunny.wordpress.com 