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Morning Devotion for the Season of Lent

March 29, 2023

Feast Day of John Keble

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: Romans 12:9-13

Let love be genuine; hate what is evil; hold fast to what is good; love one another with mutual affection; outdo one another in showing honor. Do not lag in zeal; be ardent in spirit; serve the Lord. Rejoice in hope; be patient in affliction; persevere in prayer. Contribute to the needs of the saints; extend hospitality to strangers.

Meditation – Peter Vanderveen

I don’t know of any list where the act of lingering is said to be a virtue. This is unfortunate. I think it’s invaluable – at least to the life of faith.

I’m aware of how extraordinarily counter-cultural this claim is. In our age, there’s no time to linger. To linger puts one at risk of losing something. Speed and quickness wins. A major part of what makes the prospect of artificial intelligence so enticing, for example, is simply the blinding speed with which it can get immense and complex things done. Unlike with us, there’s little waiting with AI, which inspires awe and the exciting promise that we might utilize AI to get much more in the time we have. But maybe it’s important to linger for a moment on what “blinding speed” connotes, which is our inability, our inability to see – which, in turn, may refer to the process of AI or, even more, to the consequences of it.

We are loath to admit that human life is limited in the speed at which it can be lived. But we can run only so fast before excess speed causes us to fall. I would contend that lingering humanizes us.

We tend not to linger when reading Scripture; and this becomes evident when all we really want to know is the point of a passage, apart from all its surrounding verbiage. We want someone to disclose its meaning, preferably in a single line that then can be put to use. One might summarize the verses above as a set of instructions, as if Paul were saying “do these things”: love, hate, honor, serve, and persevere. Sure. Why not. We do these things often without even thinking about it. But Paul gives us so much more to linger over.

Why, for instance, did he use the word “let” in the first sentence about love? He could have been more direct, telling those in the church in Rome to “be sure that your love is genuine.” “Let” gives a sense of passivity; and maybe this is important to notice. For is love ever strictly our own? Anger is. Hatred is. But, curiously, love that is genuine is not wholly within our own control. It happens to us. We are caught up in it. We can’t simply choose to dispense it like a product. Lingering opens this up.

Similarly, what do we learn about the good when we are told to “hold fast” to it? Maybe the good, too, isn’t something that we can conjure or manufacture at will. It may be a dimension of creation itself that we can recognize or reject, but it’s far larger and more mysterious than whatever we might judge it to be.

And what is required for affection to be “mutual?” Affection is something we often like to keep to ourselves, so that we can own it without complications. To make it mutual demands some conscious disclosure, whereby, instead of being a dream kept privately, it is forced to be shared and thus made genuine.

Paul encouraged the church to “contribute” and “extend.” These verbs don’t have the sharp bite of moral command. Rather, they begin the very generosity and hospitality that makes life inviting rather than painting it in the austere and darkly demanding tones so common to religion.

In all these cases, lingering de-centers us; we are part of something infinitely greater than ourselves. This revelation, at any level, is a great grace. We would do well to linger with this for a while.

Prayer

Loving Father, everything goes wrong for me and yet you are love. I have even failed in holding fast to this – that you are love; and, yet, you are love. Wherever I turn, the only thing that I cannot do without is that you are love, and that is why, even when I have not held fast to the faith that you are love, I believe that you permit, through love, that this should be so.

Søren Kierkegaard