I’ve been impatient with my Lenten experience this year. Somehow I expected deeper more earthshaking results. I wonder if my expectations have grown from the culture I live in that so often promises instant health, weight loss, or happiness. Perhaps I’ve fallen into the trap of wanting a quick fix for my impatience. I remember the old prayer, God give me patience, but give it to me now. In my search for an answer to the Lenten unrest that grows in me the closer we move toward Easter I took time to pray. In my prayer and reflective reading I’m reminded of a quote from Rilke.

Rilke, teaches, “Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves…Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.”

For this hour I will be satisfied to love the question. I am confident that living the question now will bring me to Easter.

”I will sing of your salvation.” (Ps 71: see15ab)