Saaxiib Qurux Badan

You feel the thirst
But none can make you drink
The answer’s waiting for you here
But it’s not what you think
It won’t steal your soul or leave you blind
It was just a cup of kindness all the time

And the emptiness you can’t seem to fill
Beauty fades and pleasures
Cannot take away the chill
And the glamour lures you down into a lie
Oh, but the cup of kindness never will run dry

You hear the vandals howlin’ down your walls
And arm yourself against the ones
Who want to see you fall
’Til some Holy Grail reveals the grand design
Well, it was in a cup of kindness all the time

– “Cup of Kindness”
by Emmylou Harris
(from her 2003 album,
Stumble Into Grace)

NEXT:
Ghosts

See also the previous Wild Reed posts:
• Undeniably Real
• Saaxiib Qurux Badan – March 1, 2024
• Saaxiib Qurux Badan – February 21, 2024
• Saaxiib Qurux Badan – February 7, 2024
• Saaxiib Qurux Badan – December 8, 2023
• Saaxiib Qurux Badan – December 3, 2023
• October Afternoon
• Saaxiib Qurux Badan – October 1, 2023
• September Garden
• Like a Lotus Flower
• Saaxiib Qurux Badan – June 4, 2023
• Saaxiib Qurux Badan – February 14, 2023
• Saaxiib Qurux Badan – January 16, 2023
• Saaxiib Qurux Badan – August 25, 2022
• In the Stillness and Silence of This Present Moment
• I Need Do Nothing . . . I Am Open to the Living Light
• Saaxiib Qurux Badan – November 25, 2021
• Blue Yonder
• Saaxiib Qurux Badan – June 29, 2021
• What We Crave
• “So You Can Only See Beautiful Things”
• November Musings
• Saaxiib Qurux Badan – November 18, 2020
• The Landscape Is a Mirror
• My Love, “Return to the Root of the Root of Your Own Soul”
• Saaxiib Qurux Badan – April 16, 2019
• Saaxiib Qurux Badan – March 29, 2019

Images: Saaxiib Qurux Badan (“Beautiful Friend”), Saint Paul, MN – Michael J. Bayly (6/27/24).

Country with Soul

. . . That's how one writer describes the music of Emmylou Harris when reviewing her 1998 live recording, Spyboy.

"Spyboy" is not only the name of this particular album but also of the backing band that Harris formed for a tour to support her 1995 career-redefining album, Wrecking Ball. On this tour, along with tracks from Wrecking Ball, Harris also performed songs from earlier in her career, including "Born to Run" from Cimarron, "Love Hurts", which she first performed with Gram Parsons, "I Ain't Living Long Like This" from Quarter Moon in a Ten Cent Town, and her ode to Parsons, "Boulder to Birmingham", from her 1975 debut album, Pieces of the Sky. Live recordings of all of these tracks appear on Spyboy, the album.

At the time of her Spyboy tour, music critic Michael McCall noted the following about Emmylou Harris and her music.

Most pop musicians in their 50s spend their stage time reflecting on past accomplishments. Emmylou Harris, on the other hand, is still moving forward, seeking new challenges and pushing into new musical territory. Always artistically restless, Harris has offered nearly a quarter century of interesting ideas. However, at age 51, she's creating some of the most lasting and moving music of her life. Fronting a band featuring the New Orleans rhythm section of drummer Brady Blade and bassist Darryl Johnson, and with alternative-country hero Buddy Miller on guitar, Harris presents daring music that is both dark in tone yet spiritually open-hearted. In doing so, she's managed to combine the progressive, provocative tension of 1996's Wrecking Ball with the tradition-based music of her earlier work.

I experienced Emmylou Harris in concert in August of 2001 at the Historic State Theater in downtown Minneapolis. At that time she was on tour in support of her album Red Dirt Girl. Without doubt she's a gifted singer/song-writer and a mesmerizing performer. She's also an artist whose work conveys a deep spirituality, though one that never comes across as preachy. Rather, it's a spirituality that's very much grounded in the rich and fertile, though often messy seedbed of human experience.

For "music night" this evening at The Wild Reed I share Emmylou Harris and Spyboy's rendition of Daniel Lanois' "The Maker," a song about which Phish.net notes:

In the same vein as "Amazing Grace," Lanois’ "Maker" draws smooth lyrics across a simple but powerful musical base. The singer laments having erred into darkness, and pauses to sigh at his choosing to be saved. The song’s smooth spirituality has fooled some to think it is an old hymnal. But even though not penned until 1989, "The Maker" has already become a classic, covered often by Willie Nelson, Emmylou Harris, Jerry Garcia Band, and the Dave Matthews Band. Lanois himself re-released it as part of his sound-track to the 1996 movie Sling Blade – and, a year later, recorded "Amazing Grace" for a compilation by the same name.

The video of Emmylou Harris and Spyboy's performance of "The Maker" is followed by Christopher P. Dunn's Amazon.com review of the Spyboy album. Enjoy!

Spyboy is an astonishing album – not only does it capture the essence of who Emmylou Harris is (as a singer and songwriter), but it showcases her wonderfully as a live performer. Spyboy is a brilliant title for this live CD. The spyboy is the young lad who leads off the Mardis Gras parade, which is a great metaphor for Harris' career. She has always been at the forefront of defining and redefining the confluence of country, rock, and folk music.

Here, she and her band beautifully reinterpret songs that she has made into classics. "My Songbird," a Jesse Winchester gem, is delivered in classic Harris style – aching, plaintive, and with an air of resignation. It doesn't matter that the song is written in the first person and spoken by a man. This is a haunting and painful song about separation that only Harris could deliver so sweetly.

This theme of pain, separation, and moving on permeates this recording, and is exemplified by such songs as Daniel Lanois' "Where Will I Be," the traditional "Green Pastures," and her own composition about Gram Parsons, "Boulder to Birmingham." But this is not sappy sentimental country-folk-rock. Instead, it is intelligent music making in the same way that is true of other performers such as Richard and Linda Thompson, Mary Black, or Mary Chapin Carpenter.

The aura cast by the musicians is somewhat ethereal, being clearly influenced by Daniel Lanois, long-time producer of U2's recordings, and of Bob Dylan's "Oh Mercy." Lanois' influence on Harris is most pronounced in her Wrecking Ball recording, a style that overflows into this live concert. In fact, Harris sings two Lanois compositions, in addition to "Deeper Well" (a song I have yet to appreciate), which they co-wrote. I have to admit that I'm getting a little tired of the Lanois style (he's also produced a recent Willie Nelson recording), however, there's no denying his success. My other pet peeve is that any recording that Lanois produces includes one or two of his songs. He seems great at marketing himself and his production style. Mercifully, a performer like Harris is so transcendental that one doesn't notice such seeming trivialities. Rather, this (or any other Harris recording) is an experience not to be missed.

– Christopher P. Dunn

For more of Emmylou Harris at The Wild Reed, see:
The Wonder You Bring
"Here I Am" – The Lenten Response

Recommended Off-site Link:
Emmylou Harris' Official Website

"The Wonder You Bring . . ."

Something special this Good Friday evening for The Wild Reed's "music night." It's "Goodbye, Old World," a track from Emmylou Harris' latest album, Hard Bargain, to be released next Tuesday, April 26, 2011.

I think this song and its accompanying video are quite appropriate for Easter, that ancient springtime celebration of new beginnings that has deep roots in humanity's spiritual heritage and is powerfully expressed in a number of different religions. As you'll see, a cross features rather prominently in the video, and while the lyrics speak hauntingly of the sadness and weariness of this "old world," they also convey hope in a "child" who "softens the sorrow" so that we can "greet the new day with the wonder you bring."

I had the pleasure and honor of seeing Emmylou Harris in concert in August 2001 at the Historic State Theater in downtown Minneapolis. Without doubt she's a gifted singer/song writer and a mesmerizing performer. This past Tuesday she was a guest on Tavis Smiley's PBS show, and as I watched and listened to her being interviewed, I was reminded once again of what a beautiful person she is on multiple levels. I think the following video conveys not only this beauty but the wonder Emmylou Harris herself brings to this "old world."

Sometimes I feel like I'm drowning in teardrops
My eyes are so tired of the trouble I've seen
Then you fell from the heavens right into this sad place
Remembering God for a while in your dreams
And you look to me now so I greet a new day
With the eyes of a child and the wonder you bring

So goodnight old world
See you tomorrow
We rise with the sun
And fall with the sparrow
But here is this child
To soften the sorrow
Goodnight old world
Old world goodnight

You fell from the heavens right into this sad place
Remembering God for a while in your dreams
And you look to me now so I greet the new day
With the eyes of a child and the wonder you bring

So goodnight old world
See you tomorrow
We rise with the sun
And fall with the sparrow
But here is this child
To soften the sorrow
Goodnight old world
Old world goodnight

Goodnight old world
Old world goodnight

Following, with added images and links, is an article from National Public Radio about Emmylou and the making of Hard Bargain.

Emmylou Harris is the first to admit that songwriting doesn't come easy for her: "It's the fear of writing that's still there with me," she said recently. Harris found inspiration for her newest set of songs in the lives of old friends, in the 1955 story of Emmett Till, and even at the dog pound. Hard Bargain, her 21st studio album, tells a batch of stories in her own words, while bringing her serene grace and light touch to some heavy topics.

Harris was an aspiring folksinger in the early '70s when she met Gram Parsons, who taught her about country music, harmony singing and life on the road. "The Road" kicks off Hard Bargain — out April 26 — with a fond remembrance of Parsons, whom she humbly calls "the only reason I'm here, or that anyone is interested in what I say or do." Harris turns their story into a universal look at forging friendships that turn out to have a lifelong impact.

Part of that impact has been Harris' career-long habit of defying genres and boundaries — and, like her previous releases, Hard Bargain frames her thoughts in folk, country and rock. Producer and collaborator Jay Joyce adds modern, quirky touches to simple arrangements that bring Harris' lilting voice front and center.

After Parsons, Harris gives similar respect to the late Kate McGarrigle, Canadian songwriter and mother to Rufus and Martha Wainwright. "Darlin' Kate" is a goodbye letter to her dear friend, who lost her battle with cancer last year.

The range of Hard Bargain continues from the somber to the serious with "New Orleans" (someone had to rhyme "hurricane" and "Pontchartrain"), and on to the sweet with "Big Black Dog." And, amid her own stories, Harris continues to share her gift for finding great songs from other writers. The Ron Sexsmith-penned title track is one of two covers — the other is Joyce's "Cross Yourself."

After a career that's seen 12 Grammys and inductions into the Country Music Hall of Fame and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Harris chooses to spend her time as a working musician, a "road dog" who still loves the life of recording and touring, because that's all part of the bargain.

To listen to Hard Bargain in its entirety, visit this page on the NPR website.




For more of Emmylou Harris at The Wild Reed, see the previous post:
"Here I Am" – The Lenten Response

A Wretched Death, a Wretched Burial

I was tortured in the desert,
I was raped out on the plain.
I was murdered by the highway,
And my cries went up in vain.
My blood is on the mountain,
My blood is on the sand.
My blood runs in the river
That now washes thru their hands.
I am lost unto this world . . .

“Lost Unto This World”
Emmylou Harris and Daniel Lanois
(from Emmylou Harris’ 2003 album, Stumble Into Grace)

Catholic theologian Uta Ranke-Heinemann writes:

[The Evangelist] John reports of a certain Joseph of Arimathea [who] took the corpse of Jesus down from the cross with the help of Nicodemus, who brought along a mixture of a “hundred pounds” (1 pound equals 1 Greek “litra,” which is 327.45 grams) of myrrh and aloes (John 19:39). The two men supposedly wrapped the body of Jesus in linen cloths, along with this enormous amount of spices, and buried it in a new tomb in a garden near the place of execution.

So because of the Jewish day of Preparation, as the tomb was close at hand, they laid Jesus there. (John 19:42)

This description speaks, on the one hand, of a hasty burial and so conveys the impression that the tomb was only provisional. On the other hand, such an expensive, large-scale burial takes time. These two aspects don’t fit together, just as the whole time frame in John doesn’t fit: On a single afternoon the crucifixion, death, and burial were over by 6:00 p.m.

. . . But this Joseph of Arimathea is not a real person. He is a fictional character, though an ideal combination for the burial John describes: He is at once a disciple of Jesus and a member of the High Council, as well as someone who is on good terms with Pilate (John 19:38). Finally, he is rich (Matt. 27:57). This sort of combination is practically unthinkable. Hence, in his commentary on John, [Rudolf] Bultmann designates the entire scene (John 19:38-42) an “edifying-legendary formation.” And, of course, “in the place where Jesus was crucified” (John 19:41) there was no tomb of a rich man in a garden. There were tombs in the neighborhood of a place of execution. These, however, were presumably mass graves for the executed prisoners, which the Romans didn’t bury in a kind of boneyard but hastily dumped together.

Jesus was executed with two others, the so-called robbers, who presumably were executed, like Jesus, for political reasons. Hence, we may assume, first, that all three were condemned in one and the same trial, and that, second, all three were buried in the same mass grave. It is characteristic that according to all four Gospels, Jesus was buried neither by his family nor by his disciples (though in the Synoptics a few women witness his burial: Matt. 27:61; Mark 15:47; Luke 23:55). Instead, he was buried by a third party, a point that the description of the burial still clearly remembers. But it wasn’t two rich and pious men who buried him – why should his family and his friends have stayed away from [such a] burial? It was the Romans who buried him in a mass grave. And with the large number of the graves, which were immediately flattened, no one could say anymore where it was.

There was no splendor and glory hovering over Jesus’ burial. There were no hundred pounds of myrrh and aloes. After the most wretched and ignominious of all deaths, it was presumably the most miserable and wretched of all burials.

- Excerpted from Putting Away Childish Things: The Virgin Birth, the Empty Tomb, and Other Fairy Tales You Don’t Need to Believe to Have a Living Faith by Uta Ranke-Heinemann (translated by Peter Heinegg), (English translation: New York: HarperCollins,1994).




Uta Ranke-Heinemann’s commentary on the death and burial of Jesus reminds me of John Dominic Crossan and Marcus Borg’s reflection on the “human inevitability” of Jesus’ death.

In their book, The Last Week: What the Gospels Really Teach About Jesus’ Final Days in Jerusalem, Crossan and Borg note that:

. . . [T]he execution of Jesus was virtually inevitable, not because of divine necessity, but because of human inevitability – this is what domination systems* did to people who publicly and vigorously challenged them. It happened often in the ancient world. It has happened to countless people throughout history. Closer to Jesus, it had happened to his mentor John the Baptizer, arrested and executed by Herod Antipas not long before. Now it happened to Jesus. Within a few more decades, it would happen to Paul, Peter, and James. We should wonder what it was about Jesus and his movement that so provoked the authorities at the top of the domination system of their time.

But Jesus was not simply an unfortunate victim of a domination system’s brutality. He was also a protagonist filled with passion. His passion, his message, was about the kingdom of God. He spoke to peasants as a voice of peasant religious protest against the central economic and political institutions of his day. He attracted a following and took his movement to Jerusalem at the season of Passover. There he challenged the authorities with public acts and public debates. All of this was his passion, what he was passionate about: God and the kingdom of God, God and God’s passion for justice.

Jesus’ passion got him killed. To put this meaning of passion and a narrower meaning of passion into a single sentence: Jesus’ passion for the kingdom of God led to what is often called his passion, namely, his suffering and death. But to restrict Jesus’ passion to his suffering and death is to ignore the passion that brought him to Jerusalem. To think of Jesus’ passion as simply what happened on Good Friday is to separate his death from the passion that animated his life.

- Excerpted from The Last Week: What the Gospels Really Teach About Jesus’ Final Days in Jerusalem by Marcus J. Borg and John Dominic Crossan (New York: HarperCollins, 2006).




On this Good Friday, I find myself reflecting upon the “wretched” death and burial of not only Jesus, but of countless others throughout time and across cultures. I think of the victims of the Inquisition, of the Holocaust, and of terrible acts of ethnic cleansing and genocide. These and similar events have resulted in the torturous deaths of men, women, and children, and the unceremonious dumping of their bodies into mass and/or unmarked graves. I also think of the many cases where individuals met, like Jesus, such wretched fates as the result of their passion for “God and God’s passion for justice,” and thus for their challenging of unjust political and economic systems.

In particular, I think of the four American women murdered in El Salvador in 1980 by officers of that country’s National Guard. These four churchwomen were victims in a civil war that would eventually claim over 70,000 lives.

Perhaps you’re familiar with their story. It’s documented by one writer as follows:

On the evening of December 2, 1980, Maryknoll Sisters Ita Ford and Maura Clarke, lay missioner Jean Donovan and Ursuline Sister Dorothy Kazell were abducted near the San Salvador airport. Ford and Clarke had just returned from a Maryknoll conference in Managua, Nicaragua. Along with four other guardsmen in civilian clothing, Sergeant Luis Antonio Colindres Aleman followed the women in a military jeep and detained them. After interrogating the four women, Aleman ordered that the women be taken to a remote field about 15 miles from the airport, where they were to be “eliminated” on the instructions of his superior officer. Each of the women was raped and shot in the head by men trained and armed by the United States [government, which is the most obvious contemporary form of the domination system that Crossan and Borg speak of]. The bodies were dumped along the side of the road. The next morning, when the bodies were discovered, a local justice of the peace ordered that they be buried in shallow graves. On December 4, the four women were exhumed after Ambassador Robert White learned of the murders.

Catholic priests, nuns, and lay workers were frequently accused by the right-wing Salvadoran government of aiding communist guerillas during the decade-long civil war; religious workers – particularly those from outside El Salvador – were routinely arrested, harassed, beaten and tortured for providing food, medical aid, and other forms of relief to the tens of thousands of people displaced by the violence. Jean Donovan, one of the December 2 victims, frequently picked up bodies of peasants left by death squads on the roadsides near La Libertad, the village where she worked. Donovan and her colleagues understood that their lives were at risk each day they remained in El Salvador.

During a liturgy held in Managua the night before she was killed, Ita Ford read a passage from one of Archbishop Oscar Romero’s last homilies, delivered shortly before he was assassinated in March 1980:

Christ invites us not to fear persecution because, believe me, brothers and sisters, the one who is committed to the poor must run the same fate as the poor, and in El Salvador we know what the fate of the poor signifies: to disappear, be tortured, to be held captive – and to be found dead.

Under Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan, the United States provided material assistance and training to the Slavadoran military that killed Ford, Clarke, Donovan and Kazel. Two months after the deaths of the churchwomen, Secretary of State Alexander Haig urged Ambassador White to publicly congratulate the government of El Salvador for conducting a thorough and prompt investigation of the murders. Haig was hoping to put the matter to rest so that full military assistance to the Salvadoran military could be resumed.

However, because the regime of Jose Napoleon Duarte was not in fact conducting such an investigation, White refused Haig’s request. As a result, he became the first ambassador to be fired during the Reagan administration.


I’m not “scandalized” (as some Catholics like to say) by the suggestion that the body of Jesus ended up in an unmarked mass grave after his torture and death. Indeed, given what scholars and historians tell us about those brutal times under Roman occupation, and given Jesus’ own identification with those oppressed and targeted by the domination system that was imperial Rome, such a fate was inevitable - and at some point Jesus must have known it. Yet he didn’t back down. And the horror of what followed, and of what we thus remember as Christians on this day known as Good Friday, leaves me feeling devastated and numb.

Can I get no witness, this unholy tale to tell?
Was God the only one there watching
And weeping as I fell?
O, you among the living
Will you remember me at all?
Will you write my name out
With a single finger scrawl
Across a broken window
In some long forgotten wall
That goes stretching out forever
Where the tears of heaven fall?

“Lost Unto This World”
Emmylou Harris and Daniel Lanois
(from Emmylou Harris’ 2003 album, Stumble Into Grace)

____________________________

* According to Crossan and Borg, the phrase “domination system” is shorthand for the most common form of social system – a way of organizing a society – in ancient and pre-modern times, that is, in pre-industrial agrarian societies. It names a social system marked by three major features:

1. Political oppression. In such societies the many were ruled by the few, the powerful and wealthy elites: the monarchy, nobility, aristocracy, and their associates. Ordinary people had no voice in the shaping of the society.

2. Economic exploitation. A high percentage of the society’s wealth, which came primarily from agricultural production in pre-industrial societies, went into the coffers of the wealthy and powerful – between one-half and two-thirds of it. This was achieved through structures and laws about land ownership, taxation, indenture of labor through debt, etc.

3. Religious legitimation. In ancient societies, these systems were legitimated, or justified, with religious language. The people were told the king ruled by divine right, the king was the Son of God, the social order reflected the will of God, and the powers that be were ordained by God. Of course, religion sometime became the protest against these claims. But in most pre-modern societies known to us, religion has been used to legitimate the place of the wealthy and powerful in the social order over which they preside.

Crossan and Borg also point out that: “There is nothing unusual about this form of society. Monarchical and aristocratic rule by a wealthy few began about five thousand years ago and was the most common form of social system in the ancient world. With various permutations, it persisted through the medieval and early modern periods until the democratic revolutions of the last few hundred years. And one could make a case that in somewhat different form it remains with us today. In this sense ‘domination systems’ are normal, not abnormal, and thus can also be called the ‘normalcy of civilization’ . . . At a broad level of generalization, Good Friday is the result of the collision between the passion of Jesus [for God and God’s justice] and the normalcy of civilization.”


Image 1: Mass grave in Liberia, photographed by Carolyn Cole, Los Angeles Times, 2004.
Image 2: Mass grave at the Nazi concentration camp of Bergen-Belsen. The clothed body on the left is of a prisoner who died after the camp’s liberation on April 15, 1945, his body added to the mass grave on May 1, 1945.
Image 3: Recovering the bodies of the four churchwomen murdered in El Salvador on December 2, 1980.


See also the previous Wild Reed posts:
“Here I Am!” – The Lenten Response
Palm Sunday: “A Planned Political Demonstration”
Blaming the Jews, Canonizing Pilate
Revisiting a Groovy Jesus (and a Dysfunctional Theology)
Uta Ranke-Heinemann on the Future of the Catholic Church
In the Garden of Spirituality: Uta Ranke-Heinemann
Praying for George W. Bush

“Here I Am!” - The Lenten Response

Today is Ash Wednesday, and the start of the season of Lent.*

To mark this important day, I’d like to share two reflections. The first is an Ash Wednesday reflection by Maria Hill, CSJ. It’s from Springtime of the Soul, a Lenten guide published by the Congregation of St. Joseph.

As the starting point for her reflection, Hill uses two verses from the Book of Joel:

It is the Lord who speaks, “Come back to me with all your heart. . . . Come back to the Lord your God, for [I am] all tenderness and compassion, slow to anger, rich in graciousness.” - Joel 2:12-13

What a personal invitation to intimacy! God speaks to each of us individually on this Ash Wednesday and asks for our whole heart, not just part of it, not just all of it sometimes, but all the time.

We know that the entire person of Jesus is totally given to us in the sign of unconditional love that is the cross. The life of Jesus manifests his compassion to all who come to him in need. He always forgave those who sincerely expressed sorrow for their wayward ways. God desires an intimate relationship with us, that together we might create the oneness that would satisfy every human heart and bring unity to a world in need of peace and healing.

If our response is indifference, he waits. If our response is weakness in the face of temptation and we succumb, he forgives. If our response is, “Don’t jar me out of my comfort zone!”, he continues to invite, so great is his love.

Maria Hill’s beautiful words remind me of the lyrics to the Emmylou Harris song, “Here I Am” (from her 2003 album, Stumble Into Grace). I like the idea of God’s voice sounding like Emmylou Harris’! And the fact that it’s left up to the listener to decide if the song’s simple chorus of, “Here I am,” is part of her call or the response she’s longing to hear.

It’s a beautiful song, and a very appropriate source of reflection for this season of Lent, this time of responding to God’s call; of “starting over;” and, in the words of Carol Crepeau, CSJ, of “trying for a full graced life again.”

I am standing by the river,
I will be standing here forever.
Tho you’re on the other side,
My face you still can see,
Why won’t you look at me?
Here I am.

I am searching thru the canyons,
It is your name that I am calling.
Tho you’re so far away,
I know you hear my plea,
Why won't you answer me?
Here I am.

I am in the blood of your heart,
The breath of your lung,
Why do you run for cover?
You are from the dirt of the earth,
And the kiss of my mouth.
You have always been my lover.
Here I am.

I am the promise never broken,
And my arms are ever open.
In this harbor calm and still,
I will wait until,
Until you come to me.
Here I am.

* The traditions of Lent come from the season’s origins as a time when the church prepared candidates, or “catechumens,” for their baptism into the Body of Christ. It eventually became a season of preparation not only for catechumens but also for the whole congregation. Examination of conscience, study, prayer, and works of love are disciplines historically associated with Lent. Conversion - literally the “turning around” or reorientation of our lives towards God - is the theme of Lent. Both as individuals and as a community, we look inward and reflect on our readiness to follow Jesus in his journey towards the cross. The forty days of Lent correspond to the forty-day temptation of Jesus in the wilderness and the forty-year journey of Israel from slavery to a new community.


See also the previous Wild Reed posts:
• The Lenten Journey
• The Onward Call