Moving from knowledge to experience in faith
The practices of Lent make room in our lives for God to break in. Okay, not if your disciplines for Lent are confined to giving up chocolate or sodas. But if you take up reading the Bible and praying daily while gathering each week with others for worship you can experience Jesus anew. These means of grace form us as followers of Jesus and even and teach us something about how to articulate our faith. Then as we put our faith into practice, for example in not only asking God to forgive our sins, but also in forgiving someone who has hurt us, we begin to move from head knowledge alone to experiencing the free gift of God’s grace.
This week, I have been thinking about the two larger categories of how we come to know what we know, which may be instructive here. I know that of the existence of both the Outer Banks of North Carolina and the Island of Zanzibar off the coast of Tanzania, but I don’t know of them in the same way. I have never visited the Outer Banks, yet I have seen them on maps, heard about them from people who visited them and even a couple of people who lived there, and I have seen photos on social media shared by friends while visiting. So I trust that there is such a place.
But I know Zanzibar in a different way as I have twice visited island. I have walked the streets of the Old Town and worshipped in the cathedral built on the site of the old slave market in an act of redemption by anti-slavery advocate Dr. David Livingstone. A photo my wife took on one of those visits hangs in our house. It shows me walking with our daughter, Griffin, in a harbor along the Indian Ocean with the distinctive sailboats of the island floating in the background.
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Wishing you a Holy Lent,
Frank
The Rev. Canon Frank Logue, Canon to the Ordinary
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