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I think it was in ninth grade that I was assigned a “pond study”. About this time of year I started visiting my neighbor’s house, Eddy Schmidt, every day and making a study of their pond. I recorded the temperature, the depth, the life I observed, the small bugs I found in a sample of water and a bunch of other things every day. I loved it. I watched carefully as each day the pond “woke up” a little toward spring. It was slowly transformed from a frozen, seemingly dead place, to a warm, teeming kettle of life. I remember I collected some tadpoles and took them home to watch them develop. I didn’t know it then, but this would be the last time of my childhood that I would do that. One of a death knolls of childhood. Perhaps you remember similar experiments. The tadpoles develop at a painstakingly slow pace. By the time the legs begin to develop, one is almost bored with the process. Yet, the amazement of the transformation catches you anyway. Eventually, I released the small, fully developed frogs back into the Schmidt’s pond. The season of Lent is about transformation. You have probably heard me talk about the word “repent” before, as in “repent, the Kingdom of God is at hand”; the words of John the Baptist and Jesus. The word in Greek in Metanoe, from which we get the word Metamorphosis: tadpoles becoming frogs and caterpillars becoming butterflies. This is the process of becoming disciples. It is less about feeling guilty and changing our sinful ways, and is more about transforming our lives. Ever since I started my own spiritual journey at around age 20 I have tried all kinds of spiritual disciplines. Tai Chi, Yoga, Buddhist meditation, other meditation techniques, prayer, Taoist study, different books and courses of study. I remember reading The Way of the Pilgrim in seminary, a Russian Orthodox book about one Christian’s attempt to learn to “pray without ceasing”. He prayed the Jesus prayer, “Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy upon me”, over and over without ceasing until it was as much a part of his life as breathing. I tried it as a mantra when meditation and running and still use it some today. Each time I start a new discipline it is with some optimism and energy. I have had at times great hopes for immense progress in my spiritual life and relationship to God. However, for the most part this has not happened. I tend to learn two things over and over again. One is that even with a new, wonderful spiritual tool, life still remains pretty much life: ordinary, tedious at times, painful at times, glorious at times. And the second is that spiritual transformation is painfully slow, like waiting for a tadpole to grow legs when you are 13 years old. It seldom happens quickly, and usually not with great drama or trumpets sounding. It is less about courageously throwing ourselves off the pinnacle of the temple and being fantastically born up as if on eagle’s wings, and more about sitting around feeling hungry and bored and wishing the stones were bread, or that something interesting would happen. This Lent I trying to meditate again. I have a new book written by a student of Thomas Merton names James Findley called The Contemplative Heart. It’s very good and is helping me work on meditating. And it provides me with a metaphor for the spiritual transformation many of us seek during Lent. Sitting in meditation can be at time boring and painful. We want to move our legs that are asleep, or inch our noses. Findley notes that sometimes it is appropriate to just move your leg and quite sweating it. On the other hand, it is also appropriate at times to not move one’s leg, but live with the discomfort. Through this, he notes, we begin to learn to sit with other discomforts and even suffering in life. Ordinary life is not generally very exciting; most of the time we have no temples to jump from. However, it is sometimes like sitting in a desert, facing death, illness, fear, failure, addiction, coming out, aging, whatever. Oddly enough, it is these ordinary events of life that are sometimes the most important lessons in spiritual transformation. Enduring, sitting with these challenges and not running away can be very difficult, and can be deeply transformative. In fact, each faith tradition that I have learned about comes back to the challenge of just being awake and fearless in the present, ordinary moments of life. For this ordinary life, we need to trust that God is with us, in us, around us, working through us. Psalm 91, considered in the struggle to transform ourselves in ordinary life and be disciples, be compassionate, act in loving ways and remain fearless, takes on new meaning. Like Jesus, we have to journey inward and face our own temptations, face the slow, spiritual transformation of our lives. We need to trust that God is with us, bearing us up, protecting us. Listen to this comforting word, “You who dwell in the shelter of the Lord, who abide in God’s shadow for life, say to the Lord: “My refuge, my rock in whom I trust. And I will raise you up on eagle’s wings, bear you on the breath of dawn, make you to shine like the sun, and hold you in the palm of my hand.”
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