Lent VI | To Fast from Certainty
“Why spend money for what isn’t food, and your earnings for what doesn’t satisfy.
Listen carefully to me and eat what is good; enjoy the richest of feasts.
Listen and come to me; listen, and you will live.
”
AN INVITATION TO FAST FROM CERTAINTY…
“When my mother suddenly died, I was thrust into the desert,” spiritual author Christine Valters Paintner recalls. “All of my certainties about God and life were stripped away and I was left raw and frightened. Many people offered trite words and shallow comfort in my grief. They were not willing to sit with my in the darkness, but only hoped to rush me through a place of light.” Have you ever been in such a place?
By journeying into the desert, Jesus showed us how to dwell in life’s border spaces where questions overwhelm answers, where Jesus depended solely “upon every Word that comes from the mouth of God.” (Matthew 4:4)
Patience abides in the wisdom of those ancient Christians who lived in the wilderness --- who tell us to let go, let go, let go, and let go some more, on every level of our lives, to everything we cling to, including, or especially, our ideas about God.
In the book of Job, God challenges Job’s desire for surety and asks, “Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth?” (Job 38:4) For God is never a set of concepts to be grasped, even tamed, but a relationship to encounter.
… AND EMBRACE MYSTERY AND WAITING
Traveling through the unknown requires humility. It requires loosening our attachment to images of who God is and how God works in the world. Ultimately, the Lenten desert sojourn demands that we open ourselves to the God who is far more expansive than we can behold or imagine.
This sixth week of Lent, you are invited to fast from the places in your life where you crave certainty and sure outcomes and release them to the great Mystery: Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Celebrate a God who is infinitely larger than your imagination and rest in the company of Jesus, who himself once inhabited the wilderness.
This reflection is adapted from A Different Kind of Fast: Feeding our True Hungers in Lent, Christine Valters Paintner.