(RNS) If I could wish you a Holy Lent, it would have two components: personal and communal.
At the personal level, it is time to focus on the basics: prayer, study and self-examination.
Prayer, or talking with God, can take many forms, from the formal to the spontaneous, from highly intentional to humble submission. The point isn’t to do it right, but to give God the opening.
Same with study. I’m reading a book called The Passion of the Western Mind. I can also recommend From Jesus to Christianity, by Michael White. The point isn’t to find a soothing book with which you agree, but to join a deep mind in its questionings.
Self-examination, to me at least, has always meant journaling. Writing down one’s thoughts and feelings and offering them up to God
That personal discernment, in turn, will refresh our communal life as those called out (ekklesia) in order to serve.
Jesus didn’t die so that an institution could be built on his tomb and its sway extended to all the Earth. That has been the aim of Christianity from the early years, and it is bankrupt.
After two millennia of dogma, holy wars, murderous crusades, compromises with the powerful and now the bizarre spectacle of a movement divided over who deserves shunning, Christianity needs to set aside its claim to global sovereignty and to focus on doing what Jesus did — touching individual lives and feeding, not subjugating or hectoring, the multitudes.
For such communal refreshing of purpose to occur, we who make up the church need to sit quietly with our God and listen to a heartbeat of grace, rather than the drumbeat of our righteous conflict.
An hour devoted to God each day might enable us to listen.
Tom Ehrich is a writer, consultant and leader of workshops. An Episcopal priest, he lives in Durham, N.C.
