Gentle Journey

            Tomorrow is Ash Wednesday, and as always, I am eager to jump in with both feet—give up gluten and sweets and coffee and bacon and sausage, give up yelling at my children and speaking poorly of others, make an effort to do conscious acts of service for my husband each day, give the dog extra attention, and to write and pray.

            And then, this morning, preparing to cantor at tomorrow’s Mass by reading through the Ash Wednesday Morning Prayer and then the daily readings I found this line, “God, lead us gently in our journey to you this holy season of Lent.”  And it made me stop and breathe for a moment.  Lead us gently.  For so often we become impatient with ourselves, with others, with the world, with the church, and we want to make it all change now.  Root out all of the injustice and iniquity.  Stamp out everything within us that takes us from God's loving presence and the community surrounding us. 

            But this work is a slow work.  God knows that.  As a child grows slowly in her mother's womb, we are slowly growing and changing and developing.  We are slowly becoming the people we are meant to be.  This season of Lent is a time for change and restraint and new ambitions on our spiritual journey, but the gentleness is what will make this change, restraint, and ambition sustainable and deeply rooted in who we are.  

            In the second reading for Ash Wednesday, the Apostle Paul tells us “Behold, now is a very acceptable time; behold, now is the day of salvation.”  Our human spirits need to know that it is not too late, it is always the right time to turn away from sin and to be faithful to the Gospel.  When I was a new mother, I was determined that I would be perfect.  I knew I had been blessed with these children (my twin daughters) through the grace of God.  I deeply believed that God would therefore give me the grace needed to parent them.  And indeed God has.  And yet that grace hasn't always made me, through my own human failings, graceful and serene.  My motherhood was formed in the crucible of two colicky infants who cried for a majority of their waking hours that consistently interfered with my (spiritual) beauty sleep.  Slowly, gently and with many tears of my own, I learned that the grace is in the waking up bleary eyed and stumbling through the dark to nurse a wailing child, change her diaper, bounce her back to sleep.  The action of service is the prayer, the practice, and even if I do not feel particularly loving while I perform them, I am still being formed in love.   

            I do believe God is with us, especially in the hard times and I know now that grace, no matter how miraculous, does not guarantee us an easy passage of growth.  Parenting is a daily practice and each day is an acceptable time to pick up my cross joyfully.  This morning, my daughters were anxious to write an e-mail to their father who is away for a few days.  I love their devotion to him and their excitement to compose, but as the interruptions increase (“How do I capitalize, again?”  “Where’s the exclamation point?”) I also feel rising within me a knot of tension as I sit down to consider my Lenten practice of writing and prayer. So I take another deep breath and remember to relax and to pray for the gentle grace of God to support me on this journey of Lent and more importantly on the lifelong journey of motherhood.