Experilent

Prepared message given as part of Three Rivers worship on Zoom, 6 March 2025.

Good morning Friends. Last time I brought a message, I spilled my coffee all over the floor, and so I have safely tucked it away. Some folks know I just started a new job. And in fact, I was on the phone with our friend Mey yesterday, taking a break from time of wrestling with the photocopier. Perhaps you've had this experience of coming to work and learning new machinery. I came to work and was instructed to print, fold, and staple, multi-page spiritual reflection booklets for Ash Wednesday. And, I would just say that my hands work really great to fold, and there's a machine that does stapling that's small and portable, and I'll figure out the copier another day.

Yesterday was Ash Wednesday, and if you've been around Three Rivers, you might know that Lent and Ash Wednesday is one of my favorite seasons of the year. And when I talk about that, I often lift up that, historically, Quakers haven't observed liturgical seasons. Friends lived in close knit communities where their social and economic commerce with each other meant that they spent a lot of time together, being able to fall into practices of listening and discernment and really leaning into the fact that any day could be holy. But I don't live in that space. I don't live with you all the time. I'm not meeting you on my way to the pasture, or walking through our Quaker community, and I don't spend as much time immersed in scripture and spiritual practices as I imagined early Friends do. So I really appreciate this opportunity to take a time apart, and to engage in a spiritual practice.

As someone who grew up in the default Christian flavor of society here in the United States, but not as someone who went to church as a young person, I saw lent through the eyes of my classmates, and was mostly about giving up things like sugar and television or chocolate, and seemed pretty awful, frankly, like a time of great austerity.

And as I've gotten older and learned more about Jesus's revolution of love, my understanding of the invitation of Lent has changed a lot. And I'm gonna talk a little bit about that in a moment. But first I'm going to refer back to a message that I brought a few years ago. I encourage you to watch it, but I'll catch you up. I shared a message at Three Rivers where I put forward a wondering and an invitation, and that wondering was what if Lent was more a time to take in more than we gave up? To take in more awareness, more compassion, more connectedness to the divine and to this aching planet. I wondered about an alternative approach of framing Lent as a practice of experimental listening. Not austerity, but deep listening for what it is that gives us joy, for that work that's uniquely yours to do. I came up with the term "experilent," to take on 40 days or four days or a week or some kind of new practice that might resist empire and more align us with God's kingdom. Maybe it's trying composting or the promise of showing up for the uncomfortable work of recognizing how white supremacy works in my life. Maybe it's disentangling myself from late stage capitalism and leaning more into mutual aid networks. Maybe walking instead of driving. Whatever it was, it was the invitation to try on something new. And it was based on what I thought was a solid sense of Quakerism's "knowing experimentally" that comes from one of Quakerism's founders, George Fox, who talked about "this I know experimentally."

The primary question that early Friends ask themselves, and a question we still ask each other is, "how is truth prospering among you?" And "is there life in it? So the invitation of experilent was to move towards wholeness and to listen for life in the manner of Friends. Stopping to sense where the life was and follow that.

Today, in a time that feels increasingly broken, I want again, to invite us into that same sense of Lenten experimentation. To consider a month long, a week long, four days of some discipline that will strengthen our spiritual muscles. But I'm going to up the ante a little bit in my wondering, and ask the question, what if we practice Lent more like Advent? What if we use this time to prepare ourselves for new life in what seems like all around us is a great unraveling? What if we considered Lent as a time of anticipation of greater room in our hearts to receive the gifts of growth, of grace, of wholeness, feeling completely and fully the grief and pain and rage of this world, but also allowing a vision of something new to take root and grow for the sake of life and love and liberation, which I think is that invitation of Jesus's revolution. One of my root teachers, Joanna Macy, talks about this work as the great turning. The great turning, she says is the moving from the Industrial Growth Society to the life affirming one. And one of the greatest indicators of the great turning is something that she and the economist David Korten call "the great unraveling."

I'm going to try to illustrate it in a couple of slides. So the first slide I comes from the Berkana Institute, and it's called the Two Loops Theory of Organizational Change. And you can see that on the left part of this model, there's the dominant system. It is on its way down into death and compost. And at some point, even when it was in the height of its flourishing, there were folks who broke off. This slide calls them pioneers. I don't really like that language, 'cause it sounds sort of settler, but we'll just go with it for the sake of this slide. And those pioneers begin to connect and build networks and create an emerging system, a new system that is coming to life and flourishing. And it is the work of some people to be hospicers of this old system and see it into a good death and make sure that people don't get hurt. It's the work of other folks to transition those who are in the dominant system to this new life affirming system. And it's the work of still others who are in this network of flourishing to grow the invitation of new life.

I tried to fix this slide and I'll see if I did an okay job. So the next slide I used the terminology of Joanna Macy. And so I labeled what's happening now as the great unraveling and that it may be the work of some of us to make sure that we protect the vulnerable as this system is hospiced. It may be the work of others of us to escort some to the new system, and it may be the work of still others to sense where new life is and continue to fertilize and grow that new life as we form a flourishing new system. Okay, I think I'm done with the slides. Thank you tech host. It's so great to have a tech host.

To borrow a little bit more from Joanna Macy's language, she says, like green shoots pushing up through the rubble, new social and economic arrangements are sprouting even now. I bet that you have sensed some of them. And we can band together and take action in our communities. Some of these efforts may be criticized as insignificant, but they hold seeds of resilience and generativity for the future. Many of us participated in the economic blackout of one day last week, which was criticized as insignificant by some, but I think that that act holds seeds of resilience and generativity for the future.

This shift in perception and values that emerges builds new structures for our common life. New frameworks and new ways to think about being together. It allows us to withdraw our consent from Empire and to begin to live into realized and embodied values. It allows us to make shifts in our patterns of consumption and community. The wisdom traditions of the world can guide us. Eco-feminism and eco-psychology, womanist and Black liberation theology, indigenous wisdoms, somatic therapies, general living systems theory, and yes, Lent. A spiritual practice of listening and taking small steps towards life. I should have said experilent, a period of deep listening and taking small steps towards life.

I'm going to conclude with a note about repentance, because lots of Christian traditions talk about Lent and a practice of repentance, which is a word that is loaded with connotations of shame. But the word repentance actually is about turning and transformation. It comes from the Greek word metanoia, which means to turn and go in another direction. To change the inner mind.

So if Lent is about return, can we use this time to return to what matters? To return to each other, to return to God. To, in some small way, reorient our lives, and in so doing reorient the world. The invitation is there. I'd love to hear what new things grow in your garden as we work the soil and we compost the old and we fertilize the new.