Trust in the Gospel

Dear Friend,

This year Lent is reminding me that I distance myself from real life when I refuse to accept my own honest, dirt-born, humanity. Honest in the sense of genuine – that core of me, with its sometimes-wavering magnetic hold on the shards of my experience, my will and memory. Dirt-born in the sense of the matter and mulch of my material existence, the dust to which I will return: humus, earth. Lent is calling me to get close to my honest, dirt-born humanity and entrust it to God.  

Trust. The words trust, truth, and tree are derived from the same etymological stub, deru: “to be firm, solid, steadfast”. How curious and instructive. Here tree brings trust and true down to earth, giving them substance, like wood. When I made my solemn vows as a friar minor (OFM) in the Mission Church in 1994, one of the friars who stood as my witness was Tony Herrera. Brother Tony was a carpenter who loved wood so much that he would salvage the very usable scraps that friars would throw in the dumpster. To this day I can see his calloused fingers moving across the grain he so treasured and trusted. A theologian of wood, not words. 

This Lent I will be working on accepting my humanity and bringing it - perfectly imperfect – toward the Kingdom of God and letting God encompasses, surround, and draw out from within that grain something new, someone I have yet to experience in the 66 years I’ve spent walking around like Dan Lackie. I think of Noah touching the earth after the flood. Time to start again in a new bond of trust, covenant. Trust me, says the Lord, and not in the abstract. “This is the time of fulfillment…believe – trust – in the gospel.”

Gratefully,

Fr. Dan ofm, Pastor