I belong to a book group at St. John’s – actually a fellowship of friends who gather in each others’ homes about once a month and discuss a book that we’ve all agreed to read. Last night was one of those nights ... where we all lingered over glasses of wine, dessert, and coffee, discussing in this case the gnostic gospels and sharing our own experience of faith and the history of our tradition over time.

In my last blog posting, “Are You Running With Me, Jesus?”, the title was drawn from the book by that name written by Malcolm Boyd and first published in l965. I reflected on that book as a sign of the times in the '60s and '70s – the decades of protest against the Viet Nam war we were mired in and against racism endemic in our society at the time (as well as now, but that’s another story). That first edition sold more than 100,000 copies internationally. It was an ecumenical best seller, found on the bookshelves of Catholics, Protestants, Buddhists and secularists alike.

Lent seems to call for a careful listening to your life over the next 40 days or so ... to take stock of your life and the quality of your response to God’s Spirit working in it if you only listen. And I do point out that even if you live to be 80 or even 90, your life is such a brief thing from birth to death. So I raise the question: What are you going to do with it – this life of yours?