Limping into Lent

a writing prompt for you

Welcome to Writing in Company. This is a community for you, whatever your experience with writing. It’s an invitation to write about what matters—grief, gratitude, grace, and more. Each week I share some ideas and a writing prompt, meant to be jumping-off points. Use the prompts however you like—to journal, to draft a writing project, as prayer ideas, or for another creative endeavor. If this one doesn’t resonate, look back through the archive for more.

In an off-kilter world, using our words can help us stay centered and move through despair toward healing and wholeness. Writing in company with others saved me once. Let’s keep writing now, alone and together, and trust our words to help us see and say what matters.

In church circles, today marks the beginning of Lent, the forty days plus Sundays that lead up to Easter. It’s a time of preparation, and a focused time to remember how much we need the grace of God that Jesus embodies. This will be the fourth Ash Wednesday I’ve sent a writing prompt into the world—a day when penitence and mortality move to center stage in our worship rituals and prayers.

This annual attempt to connect ashes and death to the generative spark of writing that I seek to share year-round could feel morose or constrictive, but it doesn’t—not to me. I’m only here in your inbox because of what I’ve learned from writing about and after death. After twenty-two years of scratching out words about grief in notebooks, here is what I’ve learned: Putting lament, grief, shame, and pain on the page opens up room on the next page for hope, love, forgiveness, and even joy.

I want to be able to explain it. I’m working on how to explain it for a seminary course, and someday a book. There is some science and research out there, but it is also as mysterious as the grace of God that meets us wherever we are, marked by the ashes and tears of sorrow, and offers us a soft towel to wipe them away.

I won’t be in worship tonight. I’m at a gifted beach condo for the week. I’m holding the gloriousness of that in one hand, and all that surrounds it in the other. Here are some of the prayer concerns I’ve brought with me to the beach, along with my luggage:

• I just finished helping put together a Lenten devotional by and for our Presbytery of Western North Carolina on lament and hope after Hurricane Helene. Reading each of the contributions was a holy task. So much destruction, and yet still so much hope.

• My task for the week is to make progress on a contracted project, writing prayers about gun violence for my denomination. This too is holy work, holding both pain and promise together. Please pray for me, and for those who live the pain personally every day.

• Not far down the coast from here, wildfires are burning, sending actual ashes into the sky—a reminder of the perilous state of our planet, and the sudden risk to our local communities, wherever we are.

• The bullies have taken over our foreign and domestic policies. The richest man on the planet is gleefully cutting programs to care for the poorest people on the planet, and calling it making America great. I do not agree or consent.

• There are some of you I know carrying your own struggles with illness, mortality, and grief into this season of Lent. We might be limping, but we can move farther along together. You are welcome to join the Writing in Company writing hour on Zoom. See the invitation here: Writing Hours

• And Ukraine. And Gaza. And on and on.

What are you carrying into this season of Lent? What are your own laments and hopes this year? I’ll be praying for you on the pages of my journal.

a writing prompt

I’m sharing again a poem I shared on Ash Wednesday 2022, just after Russia invaded Ukraine. Here we are three years later, and it is even more timely and necessary. Use it to start your writing today. Find a word, a phrase, or an image, and start there.

I No Longer Pray for Peace —by Ann Weems

On the edge of war, one foot already in,

I no longer pray for peace:
I pray for miracles.

I pray that stone hearts will turn
to tenderheartedness,
and evil intentions will turn
to mercifulness,
and all the soldiers already deployed
will be snatched out of harm’s way,
and the whole world will be
astounded onto its knees.

I pray that all the “God talk”
will take bones,
and stand up and shed
its cloak of faithlessness,
and walk again in its powerful truth.

I pray that the whole world might
sit down together and share
its bread and its wine.

Some say there is no hope,
but then I’ve always applauded the holy fools
who never seem to give up on
the scandalousness of our faith:
that we are loved by God……
that we can truly love one another.

I no longer pray for peace:
I pray for miracles.

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Photo by Amritanshu Sikdar on Unsplash