Dear Friends in Christ,
What are you hoping to get out of Lent this year? Are you hoping for anything beyond getting through it, surviving another Lent? I hope that we do not just endure this holy season, but enter it with a spirit of consecration toward a goal of the renewal of our lives in Christ. I hope you will come to midweek Vespers to think about the Christian basics as we review the teachings of the Catechism and as we pray the Great Litany. I hope you will take Joann Eastlack up on her offer to provide you with a special small group Lenten journey of prayer and Bible study. And to this end:
“Pear seeds grow into pear trees; nut seeds grow into nut trees;
and God seeds into God.” (Meister Eckhart)
St. Irenaeus was making the same point when he said: “God became human so that humans could become divine.” But how is that possible? How can humans become gods? Do we become omniscient, omnipresent, omnipotent? Ah, perhaps we’re thinking about the wrong gods. We’re not trying to turn into the god Zeus is, we’re trying to turn into the God Jesus is! As bread and wine become Christ, we too seek to be transubstantiated into Christ. We are trying to become the Love (Agape) God is.
I think the most remarkable thing about Jesus is that He posed the God question as a question about us, about our lives, about how we identify as humans. “The Kingdom of God is within you.” Or as St. Paul says, to have faith is to become a new creation en Christo, in Christ. The world will not be saved through bailouts, stimulus packages, armies, legislation, or any other political manipulation. UNLESS: before all these tactics (which may be helpful in addressing issues) we learn a new strategy. When Christianity calls upon human beings to CONVERT, we are trying to say that the changes we need to make are basic changes, big “turn-your-life-around” type changes. “Convert” quite simply means that we, as human persons, have been going in the wrong direction. We need to turn the ship around. This is what Lent is for.
The bad news is that we have been a “ship of fools,” doing the opposite from what is needed; the good news is that we are God seeds and that God is not about to give up on us. We are destined to become the Love that God is. Lent is there to help us in that mysterious growth whereby we will become, as the Army says, “all that we can be.” And “all that we can be” is, in fact, a whole lot We are God seeds. By grace, through faith, we will become, not gods, but the God revealed by Jesus. The God who lives in human hearts through faith. I pray that you will have a transformative Lent!
Yours in Christ,
–Pastor Bastien
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