As a tangible way of living out the call to conversion, the Christian community suggests three specific spiritual disciplines: prayer, fasting, and almsgiving (sharing). As the image of the townspeople burning their gathered junk as part of spring cleaning suggests, Lent is a season of subtraction, relinquishment, and of making space.

Through prayer we create a vacancy reserved for God, where only God can dwell; by fasting we intentionally create a hunger that reminds us of the need only God can fill; in almsgiving we help re-create a world where all can live justly and well.

Abraham Heschel wrote, “A good person is not [one] who does the right thing, but [one] who is in the habit of doing the right thing.” This three-fold, time-tested discipline is for the purpose of forming “habits of the heart” so that they might “easter in us,” becoming such a part of us that we live them out spontaneously each day.

These actions are not meant as self-punishments; nor are they sacrifices in the narrow sense in which we so often couch them. They are rather a foretaste of the Easter reality. Gertrude Mueller Nelson explains:

Prayer is not meant as a detachment from the world, but is an integration of the Gospel message with our human experience. Self-denial is completed beyond the self in its reinvestment of service and ministry to others. Almsgiving is not just a monetary paying off of our guilty conscience but a challenge to love our neighbor with unselfish concern.1

1 To Dance with God: Family Ritual and Community Celebration, p. 144.

FOOD FOR THOUGHT AND ACTION: Intentionally create a vacancy for God today. Turn off the NO VACANCY sign and hang the OPEN sign.

+djm