Over the last few weeks we’ve taken a difficult look at life — remembering our mortality and the brevity of life, acknowledging our fears, doubts, and anxieties, and reflecting on the confusion and chaos that often accompany this earthly sojourn.

It’s hard work to lean into and we might be tempted to look away, to avert our attention. But it’s necessary work. It’s only by acknowledging these things that we can begin to work through them. But this work can also leave us feeling frustrated and at a loss for what to do, wondering where to turn….

“I want to beg you, as much as I can, dear sir, to be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms and like books that are written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.” —Rainer Maria Rilke (Letters to a Young Poet)

Sometimes the circumstances of our lives leave us filled with questions — our minds swirling with doubt, uncertainty, fear, grief, sorrow, confusion….

Another essential part of Lent is the practice of lament — we bring our sorrow, grief, doubt, and pain before God.

Lament requires honesty and vulnerability. And although it can feel like the opposite, expressing these things with total honesty before God is an act of faith — faith that God is listening and that God cares about our struggles….

In this season of Lent we take time to reflect on our lives, on our mortality and the fragility of life in these bodies of flesh and bone. It’s a time for reflecting on our shared human condition, for acknowledging our commonalities, for remembering that though we have vastly different experiences of this earthly existence we all live in bodies that come from dust and will one day return to dust….