This life is given to me from the hand of God,
Lent out of eternity for my brief span
Which totters forward daily
Greying hair and growing experience marking
The passing
Of each year.
This time is given to us out of the life of God,
Forty days out of three years
Which mark the start
Starving and tempted Christ suffers
The sunshine
And the cold.
These moments are given by us into the hand of God
Forty days grudgingly marked out in self denial
Which share the passion
Of the suffering Christ
Tempted
And beaten
Our lives are offered back into the life of God
Our little suffering caught up as prayer
For all who share the suffering of the world
Cyclone and suicide
Bomber
And child.
God, my beginning and ending
Lend me your peace and love
And I will lend you my small agony
For the redemption
For healing
For all.
Sarah Cawdell lives in Shropshire with her husband and three teenage children.
Sarah, this is working as a prayer form. Your lending lens on Lent constructs a paschal memory palace with wings for refection on both Jesus’s agon and one’s own. Brought together in your words, they have the edge of Heidelberg Catechism Q1 (“What is your only hope in life and in death?”). Offhand, I do not recall another form that does this so well for baptism. “Teach us to number our days that we may incline our hearts to wisdom.”