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Morning Devotion for the Season of Lent

February 23, 2024

Invitatory

Rend your hearts and not your garments. Return to the Lord your God, for he is gracious and merciful, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love, and repents of evil.

Glory be to the Father, and to the Son: and to the Holy Ghost;

As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be: world without end. Amen.

Reading:

“A Pharisee is that extremely admirable person who subordinates his entire life to his knowledge of good and evil and is as severe a judge of himself as of his neighbor, to the honor of God, whom he humbly thanks for this knowledge.”

Dietrich Bonhoeffer

“Most holy and merciful Father:

We confess to you, Lord, all our past unfaithfulness:

the pride, hypocrisy, and impatience of our lives,

our self-indulgent appetites and ways, and our exploitation of other people,

our anger at our own frustration,

and our envy of those more fortunate than ourselves,

our intemperate love of worldly goods and comforts,

and our dishonesty in daily life and work,

our negligence in prayer and worship,

and our failure to commend the faith that is in us.”

Litany of Penitence: Ash Wednesday

Meditation

A guilty conscience is a terrible thing. It’s bad enough to be haunted by something that, once done, cannot be undone. Even one instance of wrong can feel more than damning. But guilt also accrues over time like layers of sedimented stone, material and stubborn, layers that wait for our memory, which always digs about, to unearth them. We slowly and inexorably build this record of our own actions that embarrass or shame us – even if no one else sees it.

Even more, however, a guilty conscience has a way of obliterating anything that might get in the way and tell a different story. It can easily sweep away all evidence of our own good as so much meaningless detritus. It can cancel the merits of our past and, with this, our core sense of ourselves. It can also close down our future, rendering us despairing and hopeless.

And there is no way out, for we’ve created for ourselves a world where almost nothing is hidden and almost everything is retrievable. We can erase the good in a nanosecond; but the wrong remains indelibly attached to us. Ours is a brash and proudly Pharisaical age.

At first glance, the Litany of Penitence seems designed to increase in us a guilty conscience, prodding us to draw to mind the whole miserable tale of all our faults. Line by line it points out the vast and inevitable terrain of our failures. But is this its actual purpose – forcing us to face up to the things that we may already be too painfully aware of? Or is it meant to do just the opposite? 

Every time I read it, the Litany serves as a deep reminder to me of the beautiful complexity of the world, the vast array of dynamics that are always in play but impossible to take full account of. The scope of what is mentioned in just nine short lines should raise in us a sense of astonishment and awe; we live our lives deep in the mix of relations that we cannot even begin to fully manage. And this concession, far from increasing guilt, might instill in us, instead, a lost sense of wonder – the kind of wonder that detoxes guilt and invites us to see the world from a very different perspective, where all that’s true and ultimately lasting is grace.

This is the rejection of all Pharisaism; but it’s the strange and marvelous repentance that Jesus introduced.

This sets up wonder.

Prayer

You come to us, O Christ: you are the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end. All times and seasons are yours, and in you all things hold together and are brought to completion. Draw us by your Spirit into communion with you and one another and make us and all things whole and free in the full force of your deathless love.