Lent, Freedom, and Taking Time to Listen
reflection by Ashley Brooks
The Lenten season is a time of inward reflection. While there is a focus on repentance in this sacred liturgical season, this coming face-to-face with sin isn’t meant to be forty days of guilt and shame. Instead, Lent offers us a path to freedom—a gentle, sometimes challenging invitation to loosen our grip on the things that keep us from fully experiencing God’s love.
Lent quietly offers us the gift of space. We aren’t hurtling through the busy Advent season, nor are we busy with the logistics of summer vacation or the transition of a new school year. This slow season of repentance gives us the opportunity to notice in new ways. Rather than approaching Lent as a grim chore, we have the opportunity to adopt a posture of openness and curiosity.
What might it look like to listen more deeply during these last weeks of Lent? Keep your ears open not only to the Lenten Gospel passages or the specific meditations or books designed to guide you through this liturgical season, but to the movement of your own heart.
Look at your Lenten prayer times as moments of invitation. What doors are opening to you? Where is God calling you to look at something differently, or to explore your faith in a new way? Broaden your spiritual imagination. If you were a child drawing a picture, God might be the teacher encouraging you to use the whole paper for your artwork, gently pushing back on the hard edges you’ve placed around yourself.
Explore your heart without an attitude of judgment, remembering that God always sees you as beloved. What would it look like if you explored beyond the belief that your spiritual life must look a certain way, or that you must have control of every situation? What if you set down the need for solid answers and held your open palms up to God, waiting for whatever you’re invited to in this season?
By approaching Lent with a listening heart, you’re taking steps toward freedom and love alongside the Source of Love itself.
Support Sacred Ground this Lent
As we approach Holy Week, we invite you to carry this spirit of listening into a practice of discernment, not only for your own journey but for the ways you are invited to support the spiritual lives of others. Many of us practice almsgiving during Lent, offering resources to those who have material needs. This is a beautiful expression of our faith, and one that is a necessary way of showing care for our neighbors.
At the same time, we invite you to prayerfully consider whether you may be called to make a donation to support the work of Sacred Ground. Throughout the year, we aim to create spaces like those Lent offers: places of freedom, spaciousness, curiosity, attentive listening, and transformation. If our ministry has been meaningful to you, we invite you to support us in our mission of offering programming that transforms our community through spiritual enrichment. Thank you for your generous support!
May your remaining days of Lent be a place to encounter spiritual freedom and the unending love of God.