Beginning Again

A Lenten Meditation on Baptism and Priesthood

My dear friend,

Your letter arrived the morning after having arrived from my own session my spiritual director at the Cathedral. As our many of our conversations, it was one which, I confess, left me feeling not unlike you. Gently undone and aware that something in me was being asked to loosen its grip.

It seemed a small providence that your words found me then.

I could picture you as you described at the Franciscan monastery, pacing the hallway with that mixture of hope and restraint all clergy tend to carry when we go in search of clarity. We imagine, do we not, that the right question in the right place will yield a clean answer. And instead, we often come away holding the same uncertainty about Lent that you carried in.

That is not failure. It may, in fact, be fidelity.

You ask what discipline you ought to take up this Lent. I wonder whether the invitation is less about adding and more about returning.

Return first to your baptism.

Before ever a stole rested on your shoulders, before hands were laid upon you, you were plunged into Christ. Baptism was not a rehearsal for something greater; it was, and remains, your fundamental vocation. You were named beloved before you preached a single homily or presided at a single Eucharist. You died and rose there. That is the ground.

Lent is the Church’s great remembering of that death and rising. It is not an annual exercise in spiritual industriousness. It is a return to the waters.

Pray your baptismal promises again, slowly, almost stubbornly.

Will you continue in the apostles’ teaching and fellowship?

Will you persevere in resisting evil?

Will you proclaim by word and example the Good News of God in Christ?

These are not heroic declarations. They are promises to remain. To remain within a people, within a story, within a mercy.

And yet, my dear friend, you have also crossed another threshold.

Ordination does not erase baptism; it intensifies its visibility. The tradition speaks , although sometimes rather clumsily, of an ontological change. The phrase can sound scholastic and over-wrought, but it is trying to name something real. In the laying on of hands, the Church does more than appoint you to tasks. Just as Christ happens to the waters, and just as Christ happens to the bread and wine, Christ has happened to you. You are configured, however mysteriously, to Christ’s own priesthood. Your life is given a sacramental form.

You are still yourself, of course. Thank God. But you are no longer simply private. At the altar, in absolution, in blessing, you stand not only as an individual believer but as one entrusted to make Christ’s self-giving present for others.

This is not elevation; it is exposure.

And I suspect this is why Lent feels unfamiliar to you now. The disciplines that once shaped your personal devotion do not quite settle as they did. Something has shifted.

New creation is not merely a metaphor for moral improvement. It is the quiet, stubborn reality that in Christ the world has begun again. And when you were ordained, you were drawn into that beginning in a fresh way. Not because you are superior to those you serve, but because your vocation now participates publicly in Christ’s priestly self-offering.

New seasons require new beginnings.

And the Church, wisely, gives us Lent precisely for that: to begin again.

Perhaps your Lenten practice this year is beautifully simple. Each morning, pray your baptismal vows. Each Friday, read again the charge given at your ordination. Let the words interrogate you gently. Let them console you. Let them unsettle what has grown rigid.

Your fasting, now, is not solely for your own clarity. It becomes intercessory. You carry your people with their fatigue, their half-formed prayers, their disappointments. Your repentance is never solitary; it is woven into the body you serve.

You went to the Franciscans hoping, perhaps, to be handed a new discipline. It may be that the Spirit is inviting you instead into a deeper inhabiting of what has already been spoken over you.

We do not progress beyond our vows. We grow into them.

And always, always, we begin again.

With affection, and the assurance of my prayers,

+Marian