Last year, Christine Sine developed a guide for Lent in response to the frustration of hearing friends say they would give up chocolate for Lent. There is much more to Lent that giving up a vice.
Posted below is the downloadable Lenten guide entitled “A Journey Into Wholeness.” Christine had hoped to update it for this year, but with conference planning, she has not had the time. It is still poignant and challenging, so please feel free to use it to get the most out of this important season of Lent.
“I was introduced to monastic rules of life in rather an unusual way. I love mystery stories, and was delighted when, about 15 years ago, I discovered a series of novels set in the 12th century in an abbey at Shrewsbury on the Welsh-English border. Brother Cadfael, a “squat, barrel-chested, bandy-legged veteran of fifty-seven,” first swept into my life in A Morbid Taste for Bone, journeying into Wales to bring back the bones of Saint Winifred as patron saint for the Abbey.”
“In the belly of the paradox that is American Christianity, God is moving to create new monastic communities to help the church in America remember resurrection. Though the signs of the time suggest that it is hard to be a Christian in America, there are also signs that God is doing something new in places that have been overlooked and abandoned by our society. Stumbling to follow Jesus myself, I found my way into some of these communities and learned to read the Bible anew with them. The story of the people of God came alive in that context, and I began to see how God has moved through the centuries to remind the church of her true identity through monastic movements. Monasticism, I learned, is not about achieving some sort of individual or communal piety. It is about helping the church be the church.”
“A few years ago, my wife and I, along with a handful of friends, started a church on the West Bank of Minneapolis, a diverse neighborhood of immigrants, refugees, punks, artists, homeless people, students, activists and professionals all within about one square mile. We describe ourselves as a community that is “following Jesus’ way of peave, hospitality, simplicity, and prayer.” People wonder if we are a church. We are–but not a conventional church. i like to think that Missio Dei is to most churches what a tangerine is to an orange: smaller, but more intense.”
“Our community lives amond the dying. Though we are young people, it routinely seems we go to more funerals than weddings, visit more gravesites than delivery rooms. It it not uncommon for our friends to fall because of AIDS, police violence, street fights or domestic abuse. We live in a world that cries out for justice–a world that needs God’s Kingdom to come.
