Lenten and Holy Week Meditations

We will be posting here and on our website at www.uuchristian.org a series of excerpts from "For Everything There Is A Season" by Wallace W. Robbins, 1910-1988, first published in 1978 and republished in 1987 by the UUCF. During this time from Ash Wednesday, through Lent, to Palm Sunday, Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, and Easter, we will be publishing excerpts from the Robbins meditation manual. The first is the following Ash Wednesday meditation, and next to come will be thirteen Lenten meditations, one each for Palm Sunday and Maundy Thursday, two for Good Friday, three for Easter and one for Ascension Day. Below the meditation is a brief biography of Rev. Robbins.

We invite not only your reflections here, but also your contributions and links to meaningful sites for this part of the Christian Year. Thanks.

Ash Wednesday

"Ash Wednesday, the first day of Lent, comes upon this week, and the entire Western Church enters into a time of abstinence and meditation as contemporary Christians retrace the road of Jesus from the Mount of Transfiguration to the hill of execution.

"In an earlier time this vigil was for forty hours but it was finally extended to forty days. As the Sundays were excluded, they being always days of joyful worship, the beginning of Lent was set back to Wednesday to allow for the full forty days.

"It is noticeable that although changes have taken place in the rules governing the intensity of fasting and meditation and in the length of time from hours to days, the one consistency is in the number forty. Forty hours or forty days; it appears of lasting significance that it be forty. Probably this number was agreed upon to correspond with the number of days Jesus spent in the wilderness before he took up his destiny as the serving King. But these forty days had their prefiguration also: the days of the flood, the years of wandering in the wilderness, the days of Elijah's fast.

"Forty is a biblical symbol for temptation, a word considerably devalued in present currency to mean the allure of evil. We have come to think of that part of the Lord's Prayer as simply a plea that we be kept out of those situations which are occasions of sin. Typically, modern usage makes the situation of temptation an outward matter. Help man to be clear of outward conditions and you will have cleared his soul of inner turmoil.

"Prohibition dealt with alcoholic abuse in this outward fashion, but, because of the inner compulsions of the addicted and of those rebellious against all authority, the situation became worse.

"The biblical "forty" stands for a different understanding of temptation. It is the tension which one feels in his heart when he sees that victory lies ahead and that safety means turning back. He may wish that the conditions which have brought him to this trial of soul had never come to pass, but since they have, the testing is not in his ability to resolve the conflict but to endure it and, ever in fear, to press forward. The real victory is not to be measured by the success of the action, but by the inner success even in the face of outer defeat.

"Nomadic Israel in the wilderness for forty years was not victorius in any achievement except that of survival as a loyal people. Neither by outer attack or by inner dissension could the ultimate integrity of Israel be broken and that inner strength was all and sufficient."Jesus emerged from his personal journey in the wilderness confirmed in his Jewish vision of what constitutes passing the test, the cleared vision of man as built from the inside out and not made by the laws of state, the rituals of religion, the allurements of pomp and circumstance.

"To reflect upon this inner meaning of nations and of men is the business of Lent."

---Born in New Bedford, Mass., in 1910, and educated for the ministry at Tufts and Meadville, Wallace Woodsome Robbins served our movement in Alton, Illinois, Unity Church in St. Paul, Minnesota, as president of Meadville Theological School and as a professor in the Federated Theological Faculty at the University of Chicago, and as the long-time minister of the First Unitarian Church in Worcester, Mass. His mission, he often said, was "to make Christians more liberal and liberals more Christian."