my gasping soul restore

oh it is palm sunday and i am eagerly anticipating easter sunday. i am ready for the resurrection. ready to be made new. ready for life in these bones. "can these dry bones live?" yes. they can. first, though. first we must enter deep, deep into the suffering of christ. holy week. first the suffering, then the resurrection. oh i am ready.

my dear friend maria sent me some encouraging words today she found in a book she's reading. i don't know who the author is or what book it is but these words resonated very deeply with me today. particularly the second one.

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Clearly, the voice of lent is not a dour one. It is a call to remember who we are and where we have come from and why. The voice of Lent is the cry to become new again, to live on newly no matter what our life has been like until now and to live fully. It is even more than that. It is the promise of mercy, the guarantee of new life. It is the resin that keeps our souls melded to the Spirit within us despite the pull of chaos and waste and superficialities on our spiritual moorings. Lent is our salvation from the depths of nothingness. It is our guide to the more of life.

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"Suffering is not a punishment," Robert Ingersoll wrote, "it is a result." Suffering, we learn as we go, is the price we pay to bring life to fullness, both for others and for ourselves. It is not to be desired in a neurotic kind of way, but it is definitely not to be denied. For when we refuse to suffer, we refuse to grow. Suffering requires us to stretch our souls to the boundaries of personal growth. It brings to the surface in us both strengths and weaknesses we could never, in any other way, know we have. It is not about surrendering ourselves to pain left devoid of meaning. It is about finding meaning in the center of the self whatever the stresses around us.

Who does not know that growth is a painful thing? It overspreads and sucks out the heart of us. It twists us from one amorphous spiritual mass to another. It shapes and reshapes us until, we come to full stature, to total development. It tugs us from small to larger, from broad to deep. Most of all, perhaps, through growth, we come out with a different, a better , a clearer perspective. We come to understand that every phase of life is to be won by dint of hard labor and great risk. Suffering is not thing in the living of a life. It takes us to the brink of the self and makes us walk back, wiser and more certain of both our priorities and our principles.