A Contemplative’s Journey

Lent & Easter

LENT 2023
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MARY PANDIANI
Executive Diretor
Selah Center

A Special Daily Series for Lent

Lent is a Christian tradition, a season for reflection, marked by fasting, to enter into a time of remembering Christ’s life, ministry, death, and resurrection. For forty days, this symbolic time cultivates places for self-examination, newness, repentance, transformation, and other rituals of letting go that come from acts of abstinence or intentionality of how to spend time. In this season, over six weeks, waiting through the mystery of Lent shapes a new awareness that culminates in Easter, a resurrection of new life.

For our Selah community, we extend these words, poems, prayers, songs, and images to enter this time with an open posture of listening for the places where the Spirit invites you. Pause and ponder what may speak to you over this season. Explore an image through a Visio Divina by absorbing what appeals to or repels you. Or choose a poem that you can use as a daily Lectio Divina. By journaling your responses, you may make new discoveries through your observations.

With the name Selah Center, we call our contemplative community Selah, meaning “pause,” ending with the word Center to name the place of our core self where we listen for the welcoming invitation of the Divine presence in our lives. Because contemplative living is not meant to be a solo act, Selah offers deeper participation in community and encounters for those who desire to develop their spiritual practices’ capacities. We embrace these values, holding onto the promise that, no matter what our circumstances, theological stances, and religious or other spiritual backgrounds, all God asks of us is our desire to journey together.

Consider this blog an invitation to listen, explore, pause, and enter the places where God wants to encounter you. Go slow. Go gently. Go with grace.

Join us on this journey.