Cherish the days

In his Lenten meditation book, The Desert of Ordinary Life, Jame Keating gives us these insights:

Through a rhythmic pattern of explicit worship and daily commitment to the meaning of sacramental living, we grow more deeply aware of God's merciful and life-changing presence in all things ordinary.

Lent becomes a time to cultivate our feeble sacramental imagination, as the opportunities for worship, prayer, meditation, service, and reconciliation increase over these forty days. In a real way, Lent beckons us to go into the sacramental and the ordinary folds of our lives in ways that enrich both; we begin to live out of them simultaneously and more deeply. Truly, as Saint Paul exclaimed, we carry the "marks of Christ" (Galatians 6:17) within us every single day of our lives.

This is true as a result of being given over to God in baptism, of being more richly conformed to Christ's self-offering on the cross through reconciliation and Eucharist, and in our particular vocations of commitment.

To receive again our call from Christ during Lent, and to let that call resonate throughout the daily affairs of secular life, is the true gift of Lent to us. . . Our daily lives carry an invitation from God to become morally good and holy; it is the only medium through which this invitation can come. Cherish the days.


In peace,
Linda+

The Rev. Linda McCloud
Pastor
The Episcopal Church of Our Savior at Honey Creek
http://www.oursaviorhoneycreek.org/
http://oursaviorhoneycreek.blogspot.com/
912-267-0333

Photo: grass and leaves
at The Gray Center, Canton, Mississippi
October 2007