As Lent continues apace and spring continues to surface, rejoice.  Rejoice in the wondrous blend of paucity and plenty through which God shapes us, his creation, rejoice in those remarkable twists of unfathomability and clarity that come from believing in the splendor of an intelligence more vast than the widest sea.
     Rejoice as well in the inevitability and mystery of being human, in remembering God's picture of its perfection, for us, in us, in Jesus, God's son.  It's a marvelous world.  But rejoice as well in the privations of existence, that life is by its very nature incomplete, though we so desperately want it to be otherwise.  It is in life's fractures and splinters that we see its true character, that we see that although life is indeed astonishing, it is ultimately the greatest and most vexing mystery we will ever encounter.  Though it's all we know, we will never solve its puzzle, the ever lingering--and pestering--question of why, existence.
      That's one reason to think about Lent.  Not to say that we should not keep trying to fathom existence, but to say that when we stand before a door into what we know in our hearts we will never fully understand, we in fact open a window.  We open a window into the tumult, the confusion, the conundrum.  And we learn that we will never grasp life and existence unless we grasp that which makes its denouements and end.
     Creatures of space and time that we be, we stumble before the maw of purpose and eternity.  But we can still rejoice in the greater good to come.