Saturday, February 20, 2010

Lenten Practice: How is my life shaped? (Intro.)


Hedging my commitment, I used the word "probably" when leaving a comment at People for Others. More specifically, I wrote: "As a result of listening to [today's] homily, think I'm probably going to spend Lent pondering this question: 'How is my life shaped by saying, "Jesus is Christ"?'"*

I'm blessed to have Paul zoom in on it, but that's not the only reason I've been haunted (think: Holy Ghost) by this question since Ash Wednesday.

Does anyone reading my work not know I was raised Jewish? For me, asking "How is my life shaped by saying, 'Jesus is Christ'?" is life-shaping for a slew of reasons, many of which become especially manifest during Lent.

This morning I realized there's no "probably" about embracing this inquiry as a Lenten practice (while eating chocolate). I invite you to adopt this question as your own, return here to discover what emerges for me, and to share in the comments box whatever answers you discover during Lent.


*Note the excruciatingly precise iterative use of quotation marks and feel free to correct me if I got the sequence wrong.

Icon: Christ the Teacher by the hand of iconographer, Fr. Peter Pearson.