Practicing Resurrection for Lent

In the last few years, I have come to hold dear the season of Lent.  This is not because I have maintained any serious practices or held any season long fasts, but because I find it to be a meaningful time of reflection.  I find myself thinking more often of Jesus, of faith, of the beauty around me.  Beginning Lent with the imposition of ashes is especially meaningful to me.  The reminder that I am dust, and that to dust I shall return, evokes paradoxical feelings of trepidation and utter peace.  The ashes remind me that I am but a fleeting whirl of dust; they remind me that God can make even dust beautiful and valuable, that God, in some unknowable way, is spilling out of the cracks and is making all things new.

I received a pack of Lenten devotionals from the local church where Jordan and I have twice attended an Ash Wednesday service.  I flipped through the pages and discovered that a poem by Wendell Berry had been included.  I have been reading Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front over and over.  I had been contemplating what practice I would assume for the duration of Lent.  I hadn't landed on anything specific, only that I wanted to be intentional about having daily practices that connected me to God and to the beauty that is around me and is me.  As I came to the last line of Berry's poem, I paused, struck by the simple wisdom of his directive:

"Practice resurrection."

This has become my Lenten journey, to practice resurrection.  I suppose I should say instead that it is my journey to discover, as far as I can, what it means for me to do this.  Thus far, it has meant fighting anxiety with deep breaths and reminders of God's faithfulness.  It has meant positioning myself to be available to people.  It has meant setting aside work in exchange for time with a friend or a walk.

I wonder, what would life be like if one actually believed in the practical applicability of the resurrection in her everyday life?  Does the mundane become beautiful, enchanting?  Does, as my friend Anne Paulus has phrased it, the "ordinary glow?"  I hope so.