My Dear Good Samaritans,

It is hard to believe, but next week we will begin our yearly Lenten journey. If you are at all like me, sometimes it is a struggle to come up with something to do or give up to bring yourself closer to God over these forty days. I have talked to many of you and there has a been a common theme: you are tired, you are stressed, you are busy. I’m right there with you. Adding a prayer practice or discipline right now feels like a lot. And yet, as David Steindl-Rast has written: “We must be able to live in an easy rhythm between give and take. If we cannot learn to live and breathe in this rhythm, we will place ourselves in grave danger.” Are you in an easy rhythm? Do you feel balance in your life between giving and taking?

Last year we did Lenten Dinners. It was very fun to get to spend time with you all in a different setting. However, I believe it is due to the joyful and giving nature of this parish that these beautiful dinners felt more like Easter Feasts than Lenten simplicity. Whenever we get together over food, in any situation I have been in, there is an abundance of delight! Which is definitely a good thing! So, this year, I would like us to move these dinner and devotional times to the Easter season, where we can toast to the Resurrection and join in the great fifty day feast of Easter. I have many ideas about how we can do these in different settings, but those details will come later.

“Ugh. So what is he going to want us to do instead?” you may be asking yourself. Well, given that many of our cups are filled to the brim (or more) I want you to do nothing. Well, not nothing, exactly.

I have noticed in myself that I have been putting my Sabbath practice (which to be honest, I wasn’t very good with to begin with) on the back burner. One of you asked me the other day when I take my Sabbath and I had to think for a moment because it has been a while.

The nothing I want you to consider doing is setting aside a day each week to disconnect. The errands, demands of work, emails to send, can all wait. God, in God’s wisdom told our Jewish ancestors in the faith to “Remember the Sabbath day, and keep it holy” (Exodus 20:8). It is a day of rest. It is a day to pause the rat race we live in, to stop, to breathe. And, in the beautiful words of the late Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, “[Sabbath] is the day we stand still and let all our blessings catch up with us.”

During Lent, I will be keeping a sabbath day each week. With one exception, it will be on Saturdays (using Jewish counting of the days it will run from sundown on Friday night to sundown on Saturday evening). It will be a day to stand still. To appreciate. To let all the beauty, goodness, and wonder that I am frequently too busy to see to sink in. I long to find that easy rhythm of give and take.

Each week I will be offering ideas, techniques, and practices to help sustain or augment your sabbath. Please, if you want, also share with me the things that you are doing and how it is going.

I hope that you will consider joining me in this practice. Pause. Rest. Be. I believe it is an antidote to the constant pull that we get from everywhere else in our culture. I believe it will help us to come alive even more. Let’s strive for more balance in our lives this Lent.

Peace and Lenten Blessings,