Allie Papke-Larson: Lent is a time to leave our Gardens
by Allie Papke-Larson
As we begin this season of Lent, we start with an age old story of temptation, decision, and journey!
At the beginning of Lent we heard the story in Genesis of Adam and Eve being pushed out of the Garden into the Wilderness. They were tempted by the serpent, ate from the Tree of Knowledge, and gained more than what they imagined with ramifications they didn’t fully understand. Adam and Eve made a choice to eat the fruit and became “aware.”
Lent is a time when we, as a collective body of Christ, are called upon to take a breath and become aware. Instead of taking another breath right away, as we have done every breath before this one, we feel that air as it enters through our nostrils, and follow it into our lungs. We notice it expand our chests, and what it feels like to release it back into the world, as if it were the very Spirit itself. We take time during Lent, as individuals and as a body of Christians, to notice ourselves, to notice our breath and see how the way we are breathing affects us and the rest of the body.
Last Wednesday the high school youth group at Shepherd of the Hills in Flagstaff, had a campfire. We read the story of Adam and Eve, expanding the readings to all of Chapter 2 and 3 so the words we heard earlier that evening “remember you are dust…” would be echoing in our memory and also around the campfire.
One of our high schoolers is a senior this year, next year she will be on a journey down to the Valley for college, leaving her home for some new awareness and knowledge that can only be gained after making a choice to step into something unknown. This story of Adam and Eve greets her as she carries out her last semester of high school and begins this season of lent, and it greets all of us who are on a Lenten journey, too.
Adam and Eve were pushed from the Garden after making a choice to expand their awareness and to start paying attention to the breath within them. They had to risk leaving the Garden for something they could not know. They were expelled from the comfortable, beautiful place where they knew they would be safe and happy, for a greater calling to an awareness of who they were. They could no longer remain the same people having outgrown what once fit them so well. Their choice to try and fully see themselves had consequences that pushed them into the wilderness.
Maybe Lent is a time when we look at the Gardens we are in, the safe places that have kept us whole, but are no longer nurturing us. Perhaps it is a time when we decide to risk expanding ourselves, risk stepping out of the Garden into the Wilderness, to see what can be learned in this mysterious, unfamiliar place.
We can only step unprepared. There is no fully prepping for this journey, because whatever comes next we have never known it before. Like those who have gone before us, we go with the faith that God steps with us. How great to have a God that walks with us not only in gardens of our lives, but in the wildernesses, too. If we choose to emerge ourselves in this season of self-reflection and wilderness, if we choose to risk expulsion from something good for something divine, then the next 4 weeks will not leave us the same.
Allie Papke-Larson is Program Coordinator for Lutheran Campus Ministries/Canterbury Episcopal Campus Ministries at Northern Arizona University and Youth Director at Shepherd of the Hills Lutheran Church in Flagstaff.
