Making Space for Love
The First Sunday in Lent
Reflection By Laurie Brock
Jesus, though he existed in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be grasped, but emptied himself.
- Philippians 2:5-7 (NRSVue)
My horse Nina is fed a mash of bran and oats and other good stuff once a week. It’s different from her usual feed of oats, hay, and lush Kentucky grass. This mash is a weekly addition to her diet that helps her stay healthy.
Nina, of course, appreciates her mash ... to a point. After she slurps up the warm, tasty slush, she leaves a residue in the bottom of her feed trough. As the days wear on, the residue dries to a hard crust that can build up in her feed trough.
Why Nina doesn’t eat all the mash but instead chooses to leave some to accumulate is a mystery to me. I trust she knows what is mostly good for her and what she likes, so she leaves the rest, knowing that someone (usually me) will come and scrape the stuff from the bottom of her food bucket so there’s no build up.
The people in our lives regularly feed us all sorts of things too, such as positive and negative emotions, desires, expectations, hurts, disappointments, companionship, all manner of stuff—some good, some not so good—that gets put in the bowls of our selves and souls. Hopefully, we let what’s nourishing feed us, sustain us, and help us.
But what do we do with the stuff that isn’t helpful, useful, or nourishing? What do we do with the gnawing anger, the grudges, the shame, and the other feelings that accumulate and take up room in our souls? Too often, we let the unhelpful stuff accumulate in the containers of our selves and souls, building up so that eventually there is precious little room left to hold the things Jesus shares with us so that we, in turn, can share with others.
Lent is a holy reminder that we all need to take time to scrape out the muck, the slurry, the stuff that either was never helpful, or perhaps once was but now no longer nourishes our hearts, minds, bodies, and souls. Lent is a focused season of prayer, of study, of contemplation, of worship, the perfect season for allowing Jesus to help us with the process of clearing out the stuff from our souls that is obscuring our love for God, each other, and for ourselves.
I imagine that when Jesus reaches into the space that is my soul, that is our human souls, he finds them quite packed with stuff. So much stuff, in fact, that the space we need to allow compassion to live and breathe is congested. So Jesus starts scraping, which is not always painless, but almost always necessary, in order to help us create space for the good stuff, for love.
Compassion is also one of those good things. Compassion means we have room to be with others in their suffering, in their sorrow, in the moments of bittersweet sadness. We need space to be companions to others in their times of need, but we cannot do that when our souls are too crowded with a slurry of sin, however that sin has settled in our souls.
This Lent, once we have been deeply nourished and spacious room has been created by the compassionate care and love of Jesus, may we be filled with the goodness of God’s love. And out of this love, may we freely share that healing love with those we meet along the way.