Lent has become a special time in my spiritual journey. For many years, my Lenten focus was on something to refrain from during the forty days. My final semester at BTSR, it was staying away from pasta, which had become my “comfort food” in times of crisis and celebration. In other years, it’s been something different. However, the main constant in my Lenten practice was reading a text specifically for the forty days leading up to Easter. For many years, it was Henri Nouwen’s Show Me the Way. This year, I was captivated by two books written for Lent; Ashes and the Phoenix: Meditations for the Season of Lent complied by Len Freeman, a retired Episcopal priest, and Walter Brueggemann’s, A Way other than Our Own: Devotions for Lent.
Over the next few days and weeks of Lent, I will be sharing with you excepts from both books that I find meaningful in my spiritual journey, and I hope will be in yours. It also will give a closer look at Tom Baynham, the person and fellow traveler on the journey.
From Ashes and the Phoenix:
“We live in a world that has spun away from holiness in pursuit of a long- lost, unrealistic dream of materialistic salvation. We are exposed to hatred that knows no bounds-proclaiming in city centers and town squares a message of vitriol and violence, seeing anyone who is different as “other.”
We are tempted in this spun-out world to view every person we meet through a binary lens- love or hate, belief or unbelief, idealism or realism. That we might pit ourselves against one another in pursuit of a belief of rightness or goodness to save all humankind breaks the heart of God who loves us enough to walk among us to show us a different way.
Jesus calls us to a new way, what the mystics call a third way- the way of the Trinity. This middle way is uninterested in being right or pious but is deeply invested in being righteous and in right relationship. We are called to be peacemakers in our own hearts and in the world.”- Teresa Pasquale Mateus, page 23.
