It is the way that we wind our way to God. It is fraught with questions and the perils of ambiguity that challenge us and call us to go deeper into the journey and, at the same time, to go deeper into ourselves.īut Ray Anderson says that “ spirituality is the ability to live with ambiguity.” In other words, perhaps it’s MEANT to be this way. The journey we take is not a straight and pre-paved pathway. And there, there Jesus is tried, convicted, and put to death. And then after years of ministry, the scene moves to Jerusalem, to the holy city, the place of the Temple. This would be the religious establishment of Jesus’ own religion, the one into which he was born. They then spend a couple of years hanging around this lake in the region of Galilee essentially trying to get people to wake up and look at themselves and their lives and in the process, they continually antagonize the religious establishment. Jesus, tempted? Are you kidding me? Then the ministry begins as he gathers this sort of wild and motley crew of followers who seem to be somewhat confused and completely inexperienced. We begin the season in the desert wilderness where Jesus, the fully human one, the one who we so try to emulate in every way is tempted.

Life is full of ambiguities faith is full of ambiguities and this season of Lent is fraught with ambiguity. The first couple ate from the forbidden tree (which, most artistic renditions notwithstanding, was not depicted as an apple tree) and the ambiguous journey began.

And the Lord God commanded the man, “You may freely eat of every tree of the garden but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall die.”

The Lord God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to till it and keep it.

Doubt casts a shadow