Practicing Lent Together
I've noticed something about Lent. The same practices we've always done, fasting, silence, confession, prayer, can be held in two entirely different ways. In one frame, we fast to fix ourselves, and the underlying message is that we are not okay as we are. In another, we fast to deepen contact with what's already here, and the message shifts: we are discovering our innate wholeness. Same practices, different ground to stand on.
This group holds the second frame.
The first four weeks are interior descent. We learn to soften, to stay present, to hold what arises without running. I've found that this builds a kind of capacity that's hard to describe until you feel it. Then we turn outward. We ask: can I hold what's happening in the world without numbing or raging? The compulsion to consume, reactive anger, the numbness that lets us scroll past cruelty. These patterns don't stay individual. They scale into the systems we're living inside right now. Families torn apart, violence sanctioned by leaders, bigotry made into policy. This work invites us to bring both the personal and the collective into the light. Not guilt that paralyzes. Clarity that lets us see and stay soft at the same time.
The fruit of all this is not expertise or answers. It's the ability to hold more without collapsing. To be present to your own pain and the world's pain without going numb. To grieve what's happening and still move toward hope. As Patrick says, a joy shared is twice the joy, and a burden shared is half the burden. We don't need to convince anyone of the theology. The practices do the work. The experience opens the door.
The Arc
For seven weeks on Friday mornings, we gather and practice making room together. Each week follows a movement of descent and return that mirrors the Easter story itself.
1. Week 1: Fasting We reach for things all day long, and most of the time we don't even notice. Fasting interrupts the reach. In the interruption, something becomes audible: an ache most of us carry, a sense that something is missing. We've been taught that ache is evidence of our brokenness. But what if it's a homing signal? The early church heard the ache as a longing to return. Not as punishment or to earn our way back to God, but to remember the union that was never fully broken. That reframe changes everything about what fasting is for.
2. Week 2: Silence The moment we try to be still, we discover how loud it is inside. This is not failure. This is exposure. But there's something underneath the noise. Most of us have inherited a story about distance, that God is far away and we have to climb to reach him. The incarnation tells a different story. God came down. If God was always coming, then we are fundamentally beloved, not fundamentally broken. Silence isn't reaching up. It's being quiet long enough and settling down into a Presence that's always been here.
3. Week 3: Body For many of us, the body has been the enemy, or at best the thing we're stuck in until we get to heaven. But God took on flesh. A body that got hungry, that wept openly at the tomb of his friend, that trembled in the garden the night before he died, that cried out from the cross. If God chose to dwell in a body, then bodies are where the sacred lives. This week we practice arriving. Not going somewhere else to find God, but discovering that presence has a location: here, in the flesh we've been given.
4. Week 4: Feeling Last week we arrived in the body. This week we discover what it's been holding. Our emotions don't just live in the mind. They live in the chest, the throat, the gut. The grief, the anger, the fear, the helplessness. They wait for permission to move. We were taught to manage this, push through, stay strong, or the spiritual version: pray harder, give it to God. But when we resist what's there, it cycles and hardens. When we let it move, something opens. The desert tradition called it "joy-producing sorrow," what happens when the defenses soften and we finally let ourselves feel what's been waiting. Sometimes that looks like tears. Sometimes it's a loosening in the chest that has no name. Sometimes it's anger that's been swallowed for years, finally allowed to surface. The release isn't weakness. It's the body finally breathing.
5. Week 5: Mourning The first four weeks build interior capacity. Now we turn outward. The patterns we've been discovering in ourselves (the reaching, the numbing, the armor, the refusal to feel) are the same patterns running through the world. They just scale. The self-protection that clenches my jaw is the same impulse that builds walls between nations. Can I hold what's happening in the world without numbing or raging? The temptation is to scroll past, or to let grief curdle into hatred. But the cross demonstrates a third way: holding the worst without becoming it. Absorbing cruelty without returning it. The scapegoat pattern keeps running, and we name it where we see it. This is the hardest practice. To see clearly and stay soft. To grieve and still resist with everything we have.
6. Week 6: Staying Good Friday makes sense. Easter makes sense. But Saturday is just waiting. The tomb is sealed. Nothing can be done. We don't like Saturday. We rush past it to the good news. But Saturday has its own work. The ancient Eastern Orthodox tradition believed Christ descended to the dead on Saturday, pulling Adam and Eve from their tombs. Even in absence, love was working. Sometimes the dark has its own labor. Sometimes the waiting is part of the birth.
7. Week 7: Rising The risen Jesus is physical, he eats fish, Thomas touches his wounds. And yet he passes through walls, vanishes at the breaking of bread. This is not a body brought back to the same life. This is matter itself transformed. Same wounds, same voice. And yet different. Paul says we're already participating in this. Every time something in us that was dead comes back to life, that is resurrection. Not future hope. Present reality. We started the season with an ache we thought was a problem. We end it discovering the ache was a doorway. We arrive where we started, and we know the place for the first time.
