Lenten Meditations
During the season of Lent we are called to examine and reflect on our condition as people living under the shadow of death, and on our need for God’s forgiveness and healing grace.
The works hung each week around the sanctuary are conceived as a series of meditations on the human condition of brokenness experienced within the world and within our own lives. Through the symbols of earth, stones, water, decay, darkness and imprisonment we encounter death, hunger, thirst, fragility, loneliness and, longing for freedom. These sparse metaphoric landscapes juxtaposed with associative words are intended to together evoke the material suffering of the world and its people and the spiritual desolation within ourselves. The interplay of word and images hold space for the multifaceted experience of being human and are haunted by a deep longing, groaning for God’s fullness and redemption.
The two black strips at the front of the sanctuary reference the ancient symbol of the axis mundi (or world axis) that connects heaven and earth. Here, that connection is envisioned as a vertical cry of lament as in Christ’s cry from the cross: My God, my God why have you forsaken me?
Each week, we invite you to write your prayers, petitions and words of lament on broken shards of pottery. We offer these prayers of lament for our earth, for our sin, for the suffering of people far and near to us and for the healing of our souls. These will be entwined together and incorporated into the black strips as an offering lifted towards God.
Our prayerful reflections and cries of lament are offered in the context of faith in God’s goodness, his compassion and his infinite love. The axis mundi can also be envisioned as a pathway of grace as God comes down to meet us in our brokenness through Christ and his death on the cross.