This waste expanse of days

Lent, like Advent, seems in many ways to be a time between times, with the shadow of Good Friday cast back on these forty days by the brilliant light of Easter morning. As I wrote in my last post here, the strangeness of Lent lies largely in its associations with the wilderness, the empty place of dust and restless wind where we are thrown back not on what we might have hoped for, but on the bare substrate of God's ground.

Prayer during Lent is strange too. If ever there was a time of not knowing, of finding our hearts emptied of words in the waste expanse of days, it must be now. And yet,

...the Spirit helps us in our weakness; for we do not know how to pray as we ought, but that very Spirit intercedes with sighs too deep for words. And God, who searches the heart, knows what is the mind of the Spirit, because the Spirit intercedes for the saints according to the will of God.

(Romans 8:26-27 NRSV)

This hermit time, far away from celebration and comfortable things, leaves room for little other than prayer, thin though the heart seems in the dry air. But maybe that is all that is needed.

Christ is everywhere; in Him every kind of life has a meaning and has an influence on every other kind of life. It is not the foolish sinner like myself, running about the world with reprobates and feeling magnanimous, who comes closest to them and brings them healing; it is the contemplative in her cell who has never set eyes on them, but in whom Christ fasts and prays for them—or it may be a charwoman in whom Christ makes Himself a servant again, or a king whose crown of gold hides a crown of thorns. Realization of our oneness in Christ is the only cure for human loneliness. For me, too, it is the only ultimate meaning of life, the only thing that gives meaning and purpose to every life.

Caryll Houselander (quoted in Richard Rohr's The Universal Christ)