Landscape Hope
Following Jan Richardson and the on-line Lenten Retreat, I am struck by her words last week when she reflected on wilderness and landscape. Pondering Jesus' forty days in the wilderness she writes that the wilderness, while not desired, is nonetheless formative for without time spent in that landscape we can never have clarity. Clarity like this doesn't come cheap. It takes a wilderness. Perhaps not a literal one. But a space where we can shed something of the familiar, the habitual, the comfortable and known; the routines and rhythms that we have shaped our lives around -- or perhaps bent and broken our lives upon. And in that space, we begin to see and to know: who we are, what we have been formed and fashioned to be in this world. I'm thinking about the landscape of my interior life, the thoughts in my head and how it feels for me to be living in this body right now. It's an odd time. I have much to be grateful for. I ought to feel at ease, peaceful and...