St. Anselm of Canterbury Episcopal Church
A Lenten Message from Your Rector
“Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return”
Lent 2007
Dear Parish Family:
Yesterday we celebrated three Ash Wednesday services here at the church which got us off to the observance of a Holy Lent. After the first service I took the picture below while a visitor named Swati helped me to sweep our Labyrinth Garden. For lack of a better title I called it: “Bubble Spider on Water.” It is an abstract picture so I will describe what it is. It is a round floating leaf on the murky water of our garden fountain. On the leaf there is a huge water bubble resting, and there are two Lady Flowers next to the leaf. I first approached the fountain with the intention of cleaning it but when I saw what I saw, I went and got the camera instead.
Many of you know of my passion for photography, and one of the themes I have been pursuing in the last few years has been the photographing of objects that most would consider debris, or garbage. Somehow depending on how one looks at these objects, it can be seen as waste, or beauty. Our fountain looks rather dismal these days, not very attractive, it needs cleaning, but what I saw was beyond the obvious. That is the power of “seeing beyond seeing.” Once you get the photo bug the world looks different; and in my case the photography bug for whatever reason is revealing beauty in unexpected places. A great teacher once said: “What you see is you.”
The desert is also known as a wasteland, a place with no appeal where life can easily be cut short. “Who in their right mind would wonder off into the desert for 40 days?” As Mother Minh Hanh said in her Ash Wednesday homily, Lent is an observed practice and discipline. If it were up to us, we would probably put it off until we had a more convenient time for it, like exercising, and like exercising, we would probably never get around to it. Thankfully, our Liturgical calendar doesn’t allow us to escape Lent, we can’t put it off; it comes around every year.
Jesus willingly journeyed into the desert for 40 days of silence and retreat. There in the barren wasteland his vision and mission were revealed, there in a place of desolation, ugliness, and even desperation. From that experience he was empowered to make real his vision, a thing of infinite beauty, the reign of God in our midst!
The Sufi poet Rumi once wrote: “What is your life, anyway? Nothing but a running from your own silence." Should we run from our own silence, spinning wheels as we drift along through life? Lent affords us the opportunity to embrace silence, to go deep within and see the things the noise and distractions of our lives filter out. We have a marvelous opportunity here to see new things in unexpected places, to see the reign of God hidden right under our noses.
As I did during our Ash Wednesday liturgies I do so again, I call on all of us to enter the wasteland, remembering that we are but dust, embracing the silence of our being. There in that silent journey, unexpected things will be revealed. If we listen to the silence, beauty will emerge, and the world will never be the same again.
Wishing you a blessed Lent, I remain…
Faithfully Yours,
Wilfredo Benitez-Rivera+
The Rev. Wilfredo Benitez-Rivera,
Rector
See previous Logs
