A Season for the Spirit: 40 daily readings for Lent and beyond

By Martin L. Smith

A spiritual classic, A Season for the Spirit will take you on a 40 day pilgrimage of self-discovery and help you draw closer to God in prayer. Its deeply personal meditations focus on themes of compassion, self-knowledge, wholeness and reconciliation, each accompanied by a prayer to the Holy Spirit, a passage of Scripture, and a spiritual exercise.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Canterbury Press
• Release date: Jan 6, 2014
• ISBN: 9781848255371

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© Martin Smith, 1991, 2004 and 2013

This edition published in 2013 by the Canterbury Press Norwich

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First published in 1991 by Fount (an imprint of HarperCollins) in the UK and by Cowley Publications in the US. Reissued in 2004 by Seabury Classics.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher, Canterbury Press.

The Author has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the Author of this Work

British Library Cataloguing in Publication data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

978 1 84825 099 4

Printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Group ( UK ) Ltd

Contents

PREFACE

THE BEGINNING OF LENT

Ash Wednesday – The View From Jericho

Thursday – In a Muddy River

Friday – The Wind in the Wilderness

Saturday – Finding the Spring

THE FIRST WEEK OF LENT

Monday – The Anesthetic Begins to Wear Off

Tuesday – The Grief That Makes for Joy

Wednesday – I am a Little World?

Thursday – The Selves of the Self

Friday – Each of the Faithful is a Little Church

Saturday – A Tree is Known by Its Fruit

THE SECOND WEEK OF LENT

Monday – Already

Tuesday – Rooted and Grounded in Love

Wednesday – All the Dying

Thursday – No … and Yes

Friday – Everyone Enters the Kingdom of God Violently?

Saturday – Body

THE THIRD WEEK OF LENT

Monday – Honor Your Father and Your Mother

Tuesday – The One Who Desires

Wednesday – The Wounded Child

Thursday – The Child of Glory

Friday – The Repeat Offender

Saturday – Those Other Christians

THE FOURTH WEEK OF LENT

Monday – Domineering Virtues

Tuesday – I Can Live With Mystery and the Unknown

Wednesday – All the Sick

Thursday – Rejoice With Those Who Rejoice

Friday – Weep With Those Who Weep

Saturday – The Burden-Bearer

THE FIFTH WEEK OF LENT

Monday – You Always Have the Poor With You

Tuesday – Gifts Properly Affirmed

Wednesday – The Doubters

Thursday – Male and Female

Friday – Of One Blood

Saturday – Widows’ Mites. Living Stones

HOLY WEEK

Monday – What We Know

Tuesday – Pouring the Ointment

Wednesday – Lying Close to the Breast of Jesus

Maundy Thursday – If I Do Not Wash You

Good Friday – Numbered With the Transgressors

Holy Saturday – He Descended Into Hell

A Guide for Praying With Scripture

Preface to the Classics Edition

It is a strange experience for me as a writer to see the word classic linked with A Season for the Spirit. The book was originally commissioned by the then Archbishop of Canterbury, Robert Runcie, following the tradition that the leader of the Anglican Communion sponsors a Lent book every year. Such books usually remain in print only for a while and are soon replaced. I assumed the book – a devotional tool for readers in 1991 – would be ephemeral. In fact, steady demand has kept it in print through the following years. I suppose if A Season for the Spirit continues to speak to thousands of readers year after year it has at least the beginning of a claim to be classic – so I tell myself. But the word classic suggests more than merely popular. Classic implies that the book has a more timeless character and a lasting authority, that it has transcended the limitations of a period-piece – and this is disturbing and humbling.

The nearest I can come to finding the claim justifiable is through my own experience of returning to A Season for the Spirit as a reader and a learner, rather than an author. Now I find myself in the ranks of readership, picking the book up not so much with the writer’s complacent or critical review of his own handiwork, but in the expectation of having still a lot to learn from it, even wanting to use it again for my own life of prayer. Every writer knows what it is like to be surprised by what he is writing: Where is this coming from? Where is my authority to say such things? The mystery in writing, as with many of the arts, is that we learn from what we find ourselves making and much of it streams into our consciousness not from the storehouse of our own knowledge or experience but from beyond it. After the passage of time, this mystery can become even more impressive. Today I find myself as a learner and a seeker, reading and praying with the book again in order to listen to a wisdom in it that is far from being my possession.

Some of this classic wisdom is not so hard to trace. A Season for the Spirit is filled with quotations and allusions from classic voices of the Christian tradition. And where there is no direct quotation there is often an echo of the words of hundreds of men and women of the Spirit who have been guides and mentors to me over the years. This is the privilege of being a transmitter of a living tradition rooted in intimacy with God, and a willing participant in the communion of saints, all of whom are invested in our future, God’s future, not in a bygone past.

A great twentieth-century lay Orthodox theologian, Paul Evdokimov, defined tradition as something that is in accord with our future that we find in the past. Perhaps this gives us the clue to what a contemporary Anglican classic might be. It is a book that gives us resources of wisdom from the past that equip us to live authentically as people of our own time and inspires us to live under the authority of God’s future.

Part of the reason for the appeal of A Season for the Spirit may be that it is helps us face the pluralism of our own era, a pluralism reflected in our experience of the complexity of being a person – a person with so many facets, so many selves of the self. We need help to see how the mysterious presence we call the living Christ touches every person in the broken yet rich community that makes up every single human heart. We need help to see how the work of creating a community of love where there is room for everybody must be rooted in the exploration of our own inner fragmentation and diversity. A Season for the Spirit is offered again in the hope that many more may find some of that help as they pray with it.

February 2004

The Beginning of Lent

Ash Wednesday – The View from Jericho

Where do I stand at the beginning of another Lent? Each one of us has a particular answer. I am at a certain point on a journey. Perhaps I have made progress since this day last year, wandered, or hung back. But the question also invites us all to make our annual pilgrimage to the same place, a certain common point for starting over again. The church gives us the map references for this place encoded in the gospels.

In those days Jesus came from Nazareth of Galilee and was baptized by John in the Jordan. And just as he was coming up out of the water, he saw the heavens torn apart and the Spirit descending like a dove on him. And a voice came from heaven, You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased. And the Spirit immediately drove him out into the wilderness. And he was in the wilderness forty days, tempted by Satan; and he was with the wild beasts; and the angels waited on him. (Mark 1:9–13)

If I close my eyes I find myself at once standing at the vantage point for taking in the movement that the scripture describes, the swift movement of a young man leaving the river bank and Jericho.

When I set out for Jericho on a day in May 1973 my mind was full of memories of the lectures I had attended at Oxford given by Kathleen Kenyon, the archaeologist who had excavated it. But once I was there it was impossible to focus on archaeology.

Imagine yourself with me sitting in these ruins. We are looking south down the deepest cleft in the earth and in the distance the Dead Sea is shimmering in the intense heat like a lake of mercury. To the east the river Jordan snakes towards it, and the mountains of Moab from which Moses had seen the promised land tower beyond. To the west rise the massive brown hills of the wilderness, rent by deep gorges. Looking up towards the summit of the nearest mountain, Jebel Quruntul, we see an ancient monastery clinging to the cliffside.

This is the place where we are all invited to stand at the beginning of Lent to take in the meaning of this movement from the river to the desert, and to be caught up in it ourselves. Lent is the season for the Spirit of truth, who drove Jesus into the wilderness to initiate him into the truth that sets free. Mark’s harsh word drove was softened by Matthew and Luke to the milder expression led. But this word drove is very precious to me. I know that inertia, illusion, and fear hold me back from answering God’s invitation to enter into the truth and gain freedom. Yet even Jesus, free as he was from inertia like mine, needed the full force of the Wind of God (Spirit, Breath, Wind are all equally valid translations of pneuma) to make him enter the testing-ground of the wilderness. If I am going to go forward into that truth for which God knows I am ready at this point in my life, I am going to need the Spirit to drive me.

This year I hiked in the deserts of southern Utah, and praying under the stars one night I smiled. Something I had seen that day had set me thinking about the vulnerability, the self-surrender of Jesus, giving himself over to the Spirit’s driving force. I had seen some tumbleweed, matted thorns uprooted and rolled into a ball, bowled along unresistingly by the hot desert wind. The desert is a place of forces that cannot be resisted, flash floods and winds from which there is no escape. The forty days for Jesus began with this handing over of himself to the Spirit. The wind blows where it chooses, and you hear the sound of it, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes. So it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit (John 3:8).

Perhaps this word surrender should be enough for my prayer on this Ash Wednesday. Not the surrender of submission to an enemy, but the opposite, the laying down of resistance to the One who loves me infinitely more than I can guess, the One who is more on my side than I am myself. Dwelling on this thought of letting go, and handing myself over to the Spirit will bring me much closer to the experience of Jesus than the word discipline that so many of us have been trained to invoke at the beginning of Lent. It should help us smile at our anxious attempts to bring our life under control, the belt-tightening resolutions about giving up this or taking on that. What we are called to give up in Lent is control itself. Deliberate efforts to impose discipline on our lives often serve only to lead us further away from the freedom that Jesus attained through surrender to the Spirit, and promised to give. Where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom (2 Corinthians 3:17).

Lent is about the freedom that is gained only through exposure to the truth. And What is truth? Pilate’s question is partially answered by unpacking the Greek word aletheia, which we translate as truth. The word literally means unhiddenness. Truth is not a thing, it is rather an event. Truth happens to us when the coverings of illusion are stripped away and what is real emerges into the open. When the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all the truth (John 16:13). The truth we are promised if we live the demands of this season consists not in new furniture for the mind but in exposure to the reality of God’s presence in ourselves and the world. The Spirit promises to bring us into truth by stripping away some more of the insulation and barriers that have separated us from living contact with reality – the reality of God, of God’s world, and of our true selves.

* * *

Spirit of truth, you know me intimately, you alone know what barriers to truth in me are ready to come down now so that I can enter more freely into the reality of God than ever before. Give me perseverance in my prayer and reflection day by day this Lent so that when the time is ready these barriers may give way like the walls of Jericho.

MEDITATION

Psalm 139

Joshua 6

Thursday – In a Muddy River

If you were to picture the scene of Jesus’ baptism in your imagination, what would it be like? What feelings would arise? I did not realize how much I had been influenced by the typical representations of the scene in conventional Christian art until I went to a showing of Pasolini’s film The Gospel According to St. Matthew. I found myself taken by surprise at the scene of Jesus’ baptism by John, and wept. It took a lot of thinking and praying to gain insight about why I had been moved by this scene in particular. In time I realized that hundreds of stained-glass windows and paintings depicted only the two figures in the water. But the film shook me into the realization that Jesus’ baptism was not a private ceremony but a mass affair with hundreds of men and women swarming in the river, and hundreds more waiting on the bank to take their place. Religious pictures had blunted the impact of the gospels’ insistence on the sheer numbers involved. And people from the whole Judean countryside and all the people of Jerusalem were going out to him, and were baptized by him in the river Jordan, confessing their sins (Mark 1:5). Luke repeats the word multitudes and paints the picture of a mass baptism: Now when all the people were baptized, and when Jesus also had been baptized … (Luke 3:21).

Insight gradually dawned that I had been moved by an intuition of Jesus’ solidarity with ordinary, struggling men and