An Easter Spirituality: Lent 2025
Resurrection, Transformation, Fulness of Life, Salvation
Summary of the series: Transformation
- Change our perspective.
- Change our thinking
- Change our relationship with God
- Sense of Faith
- Change our idea of the Kin’dom
- Change the way we live.
Week 1. Change our perspective
- Begin our reflections with Easter
- Our deepest desires
- A larger life
- Understanding the universe and ourselves
- Interiority and focus on the subject in action
- Begin our reflections with Easter
We focus on Easter rather than suffering and death. The first Easter was the revelation of Big Life.
In the aftermath of his death, Jesus’ followers experienced an awareness of a very different world. It was not that the world around them changed but they changed. Jesus did not physically come through walls but he did break through the walls of their minds and limited horizons. Suddenly, they were conscious of a much larger universe of life. They no longer saw human death as the end or boundary of life. It is not so much that Jesus came into their lives as that they came into Jesus’ life. Jesus’ life was characterised by his awareness of his relationship to God, whom he referred to as Father. His personal (mental or psychological horizon reached out to God, express in anthropomorphic terms. We are open to using different language.
Week 2. Change our thinking: Interiority
- ‘When I was a child … (1Cor 13:11)
- We are responsible for our judgements and choices.
- The pattern of human feeling, thinking, deciding and loving is normative for self-making.
- Meditation and reflection as formation
- Self-appropriation
- ‘When I was a child …’
‘When I was a child, I used to speak like a child, think like a child, reason like a child; when I became a man, I did away with childish things.’ Growing up is hard; otherwise everyone would do it.
‘When the disciple comes of age, the master disappears.’ Diarmuid O’Murchu. Here Diarmuid is reversing a Chinese adage, ‘When the disciple comes of age, the master appears’. As I understand it, the second proverb suggests that we find the appropriate teacher when we work out what we want. The first suggests that we can move beyond a teacher’s instructions when we learn how to think for ourselves. This does not mean that we do not continue to learn through our interactions with others but that we are primarily self-directive and guide our own searching.
Wk 3. The Spirit in you and me
Find the Spirit in yourself. (Rom 5:5) We are all incarnations of God. ‘If I can be still so that the God in me can get on the march, I don’t need any priest, I don’t need any preacher, I don’t even need any church.’ Howard Thurman in a Richard Rohr blog
- The Spirit is how God is actively present in creation, including in humans.
It is not that there are two spirits in me or you. The spirit in me and you is the evolving creative incarnation of God that I am and you are.
Namaste: Divinity in me bows to divinity in you
How do I identify with Jesus? By adopting his perspectives, values, worldview and commitments