In the first year of my career as a stonemason, most of my work was grunt work. I hauled rock and sand, lugged 200 pounds of mixed mortar in a wheelbarrow from the mixer to the work site, and dug footers for stone walls of various functions.
The latter included lots of shovel work. This became even more difficult pickaxe labor after we reached the strata of hard clay, which was sometimes mixed with rock-hard mica. The work also included wielding a five-foot-long, 20-pound pry bar to dislodge rocks, and occasionally a hatchet to cut stubborn roots.
My boss mostly took smaller jobs and couldn’t afford to rent a backhoe or work in crowded or steep slope areas where machinery wasn’t practical.
Footers must be deeper than the frost line so the rock structure can withstand the ground’s heaving freeze-thaw cycles that can tumble a structure. Here in Western North Carolina, the frost line is 18 inches.
My most demanding job was cutting a 100-foot-long trench from the edge of a driveway up a steep slope and around to the side of the house. After the trench was ready, we had to lug a 30-60-pound granite riprap up the hill to set it in place. Then, we had to muscle five-gallon buckets of mortar up the slope. More than once, a rock slipped out of my hands and rolled down the hill.
Maintaining my footing while clearing vegetation and digging the trench was a constant and exhausting challenge.
That labor became a metaphor for Lent’s strenuous excavating work.
Baneful habits harden or spread like kudzu in the rough and tumble of life, killing everything they cover. Hard clay blocks the roots of our spiritual growth and the mitochondrial “fingers” that process nutrition from fertile soil, stunting growth.
Sometimes, the seeds needed to enhance growth get too little or too much water or too little or too much sun. A late frost can kill new buds. Sometimes, rocks have to be disgorged.
Would that spiritual growth be more like a day at the spa, hot tub with a flute of champagne in hand! A masseuse on call, a manicurist for nails, a stylist for coiffure.
Sure, throw in some weight training, treadmill time, maybe a Pilates class and a few laps around the pool. All of these things are good and benefit our health.
But this is different from the labor of Lent, which is more feral, more daunting and risky. Lent’s work is undertaken outside sterile confines amid undomesticated circumstances.
Heaven’s repeated “fear not” exhortation throughout scripture presupposes tremulous encounters. Divine light is promised to those who sit in darkness.
Forgive me if I sound like all is muscle and brawn. It is not.
Spiritual formation will also involve being still when your every urge is to be busy— savoring life, not just saving it. It may require the enduring resolve of a woman in labor, maintaining composure with a fretful child or speaking tenderly amid brash encounters.
Patience, yes, but not when patience means throttling the demands of justice. Wisdom in taming a thrashing tongue is required.
So is exercising gentleness in prickly circumstances and vigilance—when all around you have been lulled to sleep by the deceiver’s charms and the market’s allure.
All these traits and more are practiced and refined on turbulent testing grounds where success is not assured, but bruises are.
Two essential virtues sustain the faithful despite history’s ruinous momentum.
The first is the capacity for beauty, which is far more resilient than moral heroism. It entails a beatific vision, a prescient horizon beyond rational calculation.
It involves being baptized into a transcendent conviction about the age to come, when all shall sit unafraid under their own vine and fig tree. Tears will be dried, and death will be undone.
The second is faithful perseverance, arguably the highest virtue in scripture. It requires acknowledging that our job is not to ensure the earth’s deliverance. There is an efficacious divine power and a flourishing presence beyond our control, management or sustenance.
Indeed, this divine companion invites our collaboration. But we, individually or collectively, are not history’s guarantors. Our works of mercy and pursuit of justice are performed not as obligations of a servant to a master but acts of delight from a lover to the beloved.
Welcome to Lent’s invitation to wild foraging, bushwhacking adventure, and deep excavation to uncover blocked streams of bounty and delight. Buckle up with the promise of a balm in Gilead, manna in the desert, water from sheer rock. The Beloved has pledged to “restore the years the locusts have eaten” (Joel 2:25).
As martyred Salvadoran Archbishop Oscar Romero noted, “There are many things that can only be seen with eyes that have cried.” But Heaven’s injunction to the sorrowful is this: Take heart, for ours is an insurrectionary summons. Despite much evidence to the contrary, fear not.
Though trenched by sadness, know you are tracked by joy. Another world is not only possible; it is now hastening on its way.
Hold close resurrection’s pledge that death’s thaw will dislodge the tomb’s sealing stone. Offer prayers as flares to mark the rendezvous.
Be assured, pilgrim: Love will find a way in the wilderness, reclaim desolate land, and restore marginalized people.
“Keep your eyes on the prize. Hold on.”
Curator of prayerandpolitiks.org, an online journal at the intersection of spiritual formation and prophetic action, and author of, most recently, In the Land of the Willing: Litanies, Prayers, Poems, and Benedictions. He was the founding director of the Baptist Peace Fellowship of North America and founding co-pastor of Circle of Mercy Congregation in Asheville, North Carolina.
