Where the Eye Alights: Phrases for the Forty Days of Lent

By Marilyn McEntyre

Lent is about more than going to church on weekdays and giving up chocolate or social media. It’s also a time to form one’s heart and mind through study and prayer. In Where the Eye Alights, Marilyn McEntyre offers forty short meditations, based on excerpts from Scripture and poetry, that guide readers on a devotional journey from Ash Wednesday through Holy Saturday. As in lectio divina—the spiritual practice of reading Scripture repetitively and meditatively—McEntyre invites us to notice words that may give us pause and summon us to reflection. This book calls our attention to how the Spirit speaks through phrases that can open doors to deep places for those willing to sit still with them. 

“Lent is a time of permission,” says McEntyre. “Many of us find it hard to give ourselves permission to pause, to sit still, to reflect or meditate or pray in the midst of daily occupations—most of them very likely worthy in themselves—that fill our waking minds and propel us out of bed and on to the next thing. We need the explicit invitation the liturgical year provides to change pace, to curtail our busyness a bit, to make our times with self and God a little more spacious, a little more leisurely, and see what comes. The reflections I offer here come from a very simple practice of daily meditation on whatever has come to mind in the quiet of early morning.”

• Language: English
• Publisher: Eerdmans
• Release date: Jan 5, 2021
• ISBN: 9781467461726

Marilyn McEntyre

 Marilyn McEntyre is the award-winning author of several books on language and faith, including Where the Eye Alights, Caring for Words in a Culture of Lies, Speaking Peace in a Climate of Conflict, When Poets Pray, Make a List, Word by Word, and What's in a Phrase? Pausing Where Scripture Gives You Pause, winner of the 2015 Christianity Today book award in spirituality.

Book preview

DAY 1

Remember that you are dust …

Week 1 Ash Wednesday

Yes, but it’s stardust. We are all stardust, writes William Bryant Logan in his lovely book, Dirt. "Everything is stardust." This is not romantic metaphor. The claim comes at the beginning of a long, beautifully detailed reflection on the life of the soil, of which our bodies are also made—mostly six elements: oxygen, hydrogen, carbon, nitrogen, calcium, and phosphorus.

A colleague of mine, a chemistry professor, once gave an impressive chapel talk that began, literally, with a handful of dust. He held it out for general inspection. He named the six elements of which living beings are made: oxygen, hydrogen, carbon, nitrogen, calcium, and phosphorus. This is us, he said. This is the dust of which we are made—the handful of dust from which God made Adam.

To remember this is not to deny the spiritual dimension of our being, but to lead us to radical amazement. We belong to all that is—not only to human community but to the earth and to the galaxy. We are matter and energy, body and spirit. And something burns in us that does not burn away. Describing the processes by which matter turns to energy and new life is produced in a pile of decaying plant debris, Logan writes, All that is living burns. This is the fundamental fact of nature. And Moses saw it with his two eyes, directly. Moses sees the bush, he insists, "as it really is. He sees the bush as all bushes actually are."

Science does not dispel mystery. The best scientists I have known or read affirm that. Behind every mystery we penetrate lies another mystery, one of them said—a colleague whose pleasure in biology seemed very like the pleasure a poet takes in the delights and surprises of language.

I have been meditating on the words I heard yesterday as ashes were imposed on my forehead: Remember that you are dust, and to dust you will return. A friend who was very dear to me died yesterday, only hours after those words were spoken; I carried them into the day as I imagined her quiet going, surrounded by family and flowers and lit candles, thousands of miles away. I thought of her beautiful body, her exquisite voice, her laugh, and remembered, painfully, that she was dust and was returning.

But also more than dust—more, even, than stardust. I remember the final lines of a Gerard Manley Hopkins poem, where, having acknowledged the full, hard fact of mortality, that flesh falls to the residuary worm and world’s wildfire leaves but ash, he concludes,

In a flash, at a trumpet crash,

I am all at once what Christ is, since he was what I am, and This Jack, joke, poor potsherd, patch, matchwood,

immortal diamond,

Is immortal diamond.

Pure, concentrated carbon. The strongest mineral on earth. An image of what we are that is entirely consonant with the sober reminder of Ash Wednesday: dust glittering in light, splaying and sending that light back to the eye of God, who can see in us what Christ is and be well pleased.

DAY 2

Into the wilderness

Week 1 Thursday

Many of us who observe Lent as a time of reflection, spiritual renewal, fasting, and prayer enter it with hope and, perhaps, also with a few pangs of dread. Repentance and relinquishment are hard. Going into the wilderness is hard; those who enjoy treks and desert winds that howl under the tent flaps know this better than the rest of us. Those who observe stricter fasts than most of us—monks and nuns in monasteries, inconspicuous people who come to work with unaccustomed hunger pangs—know it, too.

Lenten practices vary widely. Some young people I know take on an electronic fast, forfeiting screen time in favor of reading or solitary walks or simply the quiet that is often hard to come by. Some, who suffer from chronic clutter, undertake a 40 bags in 40 days challenge, giving away one bag of stuff each day of Lent. Some give up alcohol or sugar or shopping.

None of these practices produces magical results. Jesus is pretty clear on this subject: when he urges the disciples toward fasting and prayer he warns them about doing pious practices for the wrong reasons—to be seen, to feel good about their own righteousness, or out of legalism that always diverges from the way of love. When we do them rightly, it is to invite the Spirit to lead us in those paths of righteousness the psalmist speaks about, toward the still waters and green pastures we long for.

How the Spirit leads us is an interesting matter. The Gospel writers give slightly variant accounts of how Jesus, after his baptism, was led by the Spirit into the wilderness. Matthew says he was led up by the Spirit into the wilderness (4:1), suggesting a guide who showed him the way to an appointed place of solitude and encounter with God. Mark, ever the more dramatic, writes that the Spirit immediately drove him out into the wilderness (1:12)—a disturbing, even shocking verb that bespeaks urgency and, possibly, a certain resistance to leaving the glorious public moment of blessing at the riverside. Luke tells us that Jesus, full of the Holy Spirit, returned from the Jordan and was led by the Spirit in the wilderness (4:1). By this account we are led to assume that Jesus, already at one with the Spirit, knew where to go and went willingly, and, once there, was shown what to do. While these variations might be partly attributable to translation, they are worth noticing. This is how the Spirit works: showing up in the guise of another creature—a dove, a child, a whale, a friend—and summoning, directing, nudging, driving, revealing, and, along the way, comforting and sustaining, meeting each of us in our particular seasons of life and needs, letting us, as Theodore Roethke put it, learn by going where we have to go.

DAY 3

Watch and pray

Week 1 Friday

This little phrase from Matthew 26:41 is literally a wake-up call. Jesus says it to the disciples when he finds them sleeping through what was to be an hour of prayer. It is another of the many moments in the Gospel stories that is both convicting and slightly comical. Most of us will not find it hard to sympathize with the drowsy men who are trying so hard to be faithful and failing in such a common, human way. I think of the times I’ve had to prod myself awake during a long service—or given way to sleep and been nudged back to consciousness by a fellow worshiper who doesn’t want me to fall into his lap.

The two verbs, watch and pray, have been grafted to one another for centuries in liturgy as well as Scripture, and so, when we hear them, we might sometimes hear them as a single act: watchandpray.

Watching is part of praying. As we step into a quiet space, drop into a pool of silence, and open ourselves to divine presence, leaving behind distractions as well as we can manage, awareness and awakeness assume a quality of expectancy: something is about to happen. The Spirit is about to show up. We may suddenly find ourselves at peace in the midst of the day’s frustrations or even in the midst of political threats or natural disasters. Or a sorrow we’ve been suppressing might bring sudden healing tears. Or a simple sentence might give us direction. Or inexplicable, irrational joy might erupt for