Monday of the Sixth Week of Lent: Cleansing

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Spring is time for cleaning. And although it has lost much spiritual significance, there is an historically spiritual reason for the cleaning. This time of Lent was a preparation of the new converts to be brought into the community of faith.

They were preparing themselves, spiritually, for baptism, for the way in which all Christians are received into the church. But as time went on, there was a group participation in this Lent, this preparation, by the whole community as it moved through these rituals of a meal (Maundy Thursday), a death (Good Friday), the time in between, and the dawning of new life (Easter).

The first Easter after my father’s death did not feel like much of a celebration. I still walked through the fog that comes with grief, not feeling present in the world. There were times when the reality of his death would come again, emerging from the mist, shocking me again. There remained the struggle with who he had been in my life, what sort of father he was. And there was the anxiety that emerges with the questions of what would happen next, to me, to my mother, and to the land on which I had been raised.

The land looked different than it did when I grew up there.

Much of the “cleaning” of the farm was done before his death, by my father…

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Jason B. Hobbs LCSW, M.Div
Unless a Grain of Wheat Falls

clinical social worker, spiritual director, author, husband, father, son, runner in Georgia, co-author of When Anxiety Strikes from Kregel Publications.