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Lent: Teresa of Avila

Reflections of Lent in the Spirituality of Teresa of Avila

St. Teresa of Avila (d. 1582)  did not write explicitly about the season of Lent, but the Lenten themes that we have been exploring over the past month and a half weave their way through her writing. In this extended Lenten At the Table blog, I will summarize six major themes of her spirituality.

 

A recent book makes the claim: “We live in an age of the celebrity.” [1] It offers an alternative for our culture, which is to return to what I like to call “centuries-deep” teachings and insights from the great cloud of witnesses in the history of churches around the world.

 

One of those is Dr. Teresa, the first of only four women to be named a “doctor of the church.”  Teresa was a 16th-century Spanish nun, mystic and spiritual writer, and reformer of her Carmelite order.   She made it her mission to restore contemplative forms to this order in the Catholic Church. 

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Lent: Prophetic and Poetic Paths Part 2

Lent: The Prophetic and Poetic Paths Part 2

Poetic Path

Kathleen Norris frames Lent as a time of remembering or returning and embracing the rhythms of monastic practice.  It is a time, she would say, for contemplation and spiritual discipline.  As a poet and Benedictine, she sees Lent as a time to return to silence, simplicity, and a deep awareness of God’s presence.  She even speaks of the Lenten experience as something like the desert experience, recognizing that both dryness and struggle are part of the spiritual journey.  One of her primary practices is lectio divina, which is the slow, meditative reading of scripture. 

Following today’s blog, you will find an outline for the practice of lectio divina by which we allow the words of scripture to shape the heart and imagination, something essential in this age of distraction. Like Peterson, she would say that fasting is a practice of detachment, not merely from food, but anything that keeps one from being fully present to God, including our busyness, perfectionism, self-doubt, and abstracted faith.

Prophetic Path

Walter Brueggemann looks to the prophetic traditions of the Hebrew Bible and sees Lent as a season where believers are called to resist the dominant narrative, as he would call them, of empire: materialism, individualism, and injustice.  Therefore, he would say we fast not just from food but from the illusions of security, control, and excess that define our modern culture. 

One of his essential Lenten practices is simply truth-telling.  Lent invites believers to examine the lies that they have accepted about themselves, society, or about God.  This requires engaging deeply with the Bible, particularly the prophetic voices that call for justice, mercy, faithfulness, and care for the widow, the orphan, and the stranger in the land.  Read More

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Lent: Prophetic and Poetic Paths—Part 1

Lent: Prophetic and Poetic Paths—Part 1

Two of our final two portraits for Lent will be presented for the diversity they bring in their understanding and practice of Lent.  Walter Brueggeman is first and foremost a professor of Old Testament studies.  Kathleen Norris is a poet and spiritual writer, both of whom we need to listen to.  I have read nearly all their published works, so, I’ll call them by name:  Walter teaches us that Lent is misunderstood as a season for giving up.  He calls us to a practice of taking on. I first used his stellar book, The Prophetic Imagination, as the text for undergrads at a college in South Dakota.

A professor’s thoughts on Lent 

Walter teaches us that Lent is not just about giving up things (like fasting or self-denial) but also about taking on—practices that align with God’s justice and renewal.  He emphasizes that Lent is a time for transformation—moving beyond personal sacrifice to actively engaging in acts of mercy, justice, and prophetic imagination.  He turns our ears to Jeremiah, the prophet, who spoke fiercely against being neutral about God and God’s ways. 

 

Jeremiah gives witness to the real presence of God who has capacity to bring newness to otherwise broken social realities marked by violence, division, animosity, ethnic hatred, and hostile political partisanship.

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Lent: A Season of Darkness

In her book Learning to Walk in the Dark, Barbara Brown Taylor challenged Christians to pause and embrace Lent as a season of “darkness.” True, Lent comes in spring, perhaps just before Daylight Savings Time, but she means something far deeper when she speaks of darkness. For her, Lent is an invitation to explore the parts of life and faith that are often overlooked, avoided, and clothed in our doubts, fears, and uncertainties.

 

Like Peterson, Taylor is a realist who understands how easy it is to hold on to easy answers when faced with the mystery of our faith.  Her practices include silence and contemplation by which we dwell in the “shadows,”  where she believes God often speaks profoundly.  For her, Lent is reframed not as a season of deprivation and letting go as much as a period of deep discovery and growth by which we face what is within.

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Lent: A Season of Reorientation

Last week I introduced Henri Nouwen and Lent as a journey of the heart; this week let’s consider Eugene Peterson and Lent as a season of reorientation.

I met Eugene Peterson at a campus ministry gathering in the early 90s.  I took classes from him and consider him my spiritual father, though we had only a handful of times together.  Lent, as an annual remembrance, was, like other practices, a time for reorienting one’s life toward God’s kingdom.  He emphasized what he might even have called the countercultural nature of Lent by which Christians learn to resist the pull and lure of consumerism and self-centered living. Read More

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Lent: A Journey of the Heart

A journey of the heart

Henri Nouwen, known for his deep insights into spiritual life, saw Lent as a time for inner transformation—a journey of the heart. He often emphasized the importance of vulnerability, inviting followers of Jesus to step away from the distractions that impede their souls and examine their hearts honestly. Nouwen described Lent as a journey of returning to God, very much in the thread of the story of the prodigal son.

He first saw a reproduction of Rembrandt’s painting entitled, “The Return of the Prodigal Son” on a colleague’s office door. It may be impossible to explain the lifelong impact that experience had on Henri’s life. The image stirred something deeply profound in his heart.  Read More

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A Deeper Meaning of Lent

Learning from Phil

Growing up, I didn’t know about Lent from my own experience; I only knew about it from my Catholic friend, Phil.  For a while, we were inseparable, sharing employment with the Chicago Tribune by delivering newspapers in the early morning hours. We went to school together from Ben Franklin Elementary School, Glen Ellyn Junior High, to Glenbard West High School.  Lent for Phil, as I recall, was about giving up something like Snicker bars, or Wrigley chewing gum.  In time, I learned a deeper meaning. 

Lent is the season of 40 days leading to our celebration of Easter, the resurrection of Jesus. The word simply means ”springtime,” but in liturgical circles, it is understood as a time of preparation—almost a desert experience like Jesus’ 40 days in the wilderness after his baptism.

“First popularized in the fourth century, Lent is traditionally associated with penitence, fasting, almsgiving, and prayer. It is a time for ‘giving things up’ balanced by ‘giving to those in need.’”[1]  Some consider it a time of dread and darkness, but it is better understood as a time of prayerful self-reflection.  It is “…a time to stop hanging on to whatever shreds of goodness we perceive in ourselves; a time to ask God to show us what we really look like.”[2] Read More

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A VantagePoint3 Gathering

We host a VantagePoint3 Gathering every couple of years and invite our dispersed community of developmentally minded leaders to join us. Last week, 77 of us gathered in Scottsdale, AZ.

A group of men and women, ages 17 to 84, came together, sharing a deep concern for “growing up in every way into Christ” and helping others grow up into Christ. Most of us also wanted to find a little warmth amidst winter’s cold. Read More

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Formed by faithful repetition

We are a culture that values the immediate, the fast, and the rapid. I want my coffee within a minute, my burger in two, and my customer service call to be answered stat. A friend of mine, Ben, used a phrase as he told me the story of his spiritual journey. The earliest stage he called “trust and obey,” which mostly meant trying to stay out of trouble and do as he was told (by his parents, the church, and the pastor). A second stage had to do with “knowing more,” which, for him, meant more informational knowledge—cognitive knowing where “being right” was more important than being righteous. But he used a phrase that captivated my imagination: “faithful repetition,” which, in his experience, meant mostly rote memorization or surface-level intellectual learning. I’d like to reclaim that phrase in a more positive view.  Read More

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Uncle Tom’s Walks

Keith’s “Little Explorer on Board” blog last week caused me to think more about the connection between spiritual mentoring, leaving a legacy, and committing to our growth. This led me to recall one such person in my family whose influence has spread across several generations. My Uncle Tom was my dad’s uncle, one of my grandmother’s four brothers.

In my family, the Uncle Tom stories abound

Uncle Tom was quite a humorous character. In our family, the stories abound. He was the sort of person who, when told not to touch the chocolate fudge cooling in the kitchen, was known not just to brush aside such cautions by taking a finger full, but he was known to take the whole tray with him to work. As a butcher, he was known to cause a couple of unsuspecting women to all but pass out by his sharp chop of the cleaver, followed by yelling and writhing as if he had just chopped off a finger or two.

My dad tells a story of Uncle Tom taking him and his sister fishing when they were still young at a creek a short walk from their house. Now, this creek was lucky to have a couple of frogs, some worms, and a stray snake or two. It majored mostly on mosquitoes. There were no fish to be found in that creek. But my dad and Aunt Harriet were very young, and they didn’t know better. So off they went with Uncle Tom and two fishing rods. He generated the enthusiasm of a serious fisherman at a raging Montana stream. Once they got to the creek, he set them up, and they started fishing. He didn’t place them right next to each other but spread them out a bit “so that we can find out where the fish are really biting.” As Dad tells it, Uncle Tom moved back and forth between the two of them for a bit. Read More