Lent, perhaps my favorite season in the Church Kalendar, remains a mystery to me.  How can a season so stripped of adornment be so packed with spiritual content?  How can this five week long, minor key, penitential foray be the antecedent to the glory that is the Resurrection? How is it that finally beginning to move forward in my Christian journey is all wrapped up in turning myself around and walking on a new path in a different direction. How is it that a season steeped in the final judgment of God points ultimately to His Love and forgiveness?

            In the face of all this and if we take those questions seriously, How might we learn to live reconciling lives?  What might we do to assist God in His redemption of the world?  Can we begin to try to love as Christ loved us?  Might we recognize God’s forgiving nature by becoming more forgiving ourselves? Is it possible for us to become messengers of the Gospel by living Gospel lives, Holy and acceptable to God?

            I don’t intend to even begin to try and answers the questions I have posed to you.  More and more I am coming to believe that we do not first find God in the answers.  We discover Him in the questions of our lives.  It is in the struggle to know the seemingly unknowable that we begin to be transformed.  It is in conversing with God

that we are able to know God – and his will for us more clearly.

            Easy answers – especially given to us by others – rarely satisfy for long. How God speaks to your innermost heart is different from how he speaks to mine.  The questions about life and about God that I need to struggle with may not be the same as yours.  We want to find God in the answers.  It is easier that way.  We say that Scripture is God’s answer book.  I believe it is really God’s question book.  It is where we start our conversation with God, not where the conversation ends.  Most of us realize that what we learned in school – no matter what level of schooling – really had little to do with what we read in the textbooks, except in how those books called us to see life’s questions in a new way.  It was in the dialogue with our teachers and professors and with each other that our lives began to change and grow and mature.

            We will grow as Christians in the very same way.  As we engage God – through worship and prayer, meditation and conversation – and as we engage each other in love and charity, exploring our similarities and our differences, that we will more and more begin to live Christ-like lives.  God lives in the great questions we have about our lives;  about living and dying, about relationships, about sin and forgiveness, repentance and reconciliation, and finally about how we may learn to love one another even as Christ loves us.

            So Lent remains a happy mystery to me.  It fills me full of questions large and small that I can’t wait to speak with God about.  Questions that enrich my relationship with my Creator.  Questions that challenge me to understand more clearly and dearly God’s will for me. Questions that often lead to other questions in an unending conversation with the One who has known and loved me before I was in my mother’s womb.  I pray for each of you a Holy Lent and a Joyous Easter.