Lent: A Path through the Chaos

These are the words that are percolating in my heart as I prepare for Lent 2015: 

"Jan Richardson writing in her post, The Artful Ashes, shares what she discovered when she undertook a project where she learned to draw in charcoal: 'Taking up a new medium, entering a different way of working, diving or tiptoeing into a new approach: all of this can be complex, unsettling, disorienting. Launching into the unknown and untried confronts us with what is undeveloped within us. It compels us to see where we are not adept, where we still lack skill, where we possess little gracefulness. Yet what may seem like inadequacy-as I felt in my early attempts with charcoal- becomes fantastic fodder for the creative process, and for life. Allowing ourselves to be present to the messiness provides an amazing way to sort through what is essential and to clear a path through the chaos. 

(The Ashes) beckon us to consider what is most basic to us, what is elemental, what survives after all that is extraneous is burned away. With its images of ashes and wildness, Lent challenges us to reflect on what we have filled our lives with, and to see if there are habits, practices, possessions, and ways of being that have accumulated, encroached, invaded, accreted, layer upon layer, becoming a pattern of chaos that threatens to insulate us and dull us to the presence of God." from the app Lectio Divina- Lent