Pilgrimage, Lent, and Giving Up Words

Last updated on: March 18, 2019 at 1:45 pm by Laura Jean Truman

Pilgrimage, Lent, and Giving Up Words 2019-03-18T13:45:44-04:00 Laura Jean Truman

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I’m taking a break from writing this Lent, while I go on pilgrimage on the Way of St. Francis of Assisi in Italy! I head out tomorrow and will be back writing on Patheos and my personal blog after Easter. I’m so excited to share with you all about my time in Italy when I get back, and so excited to take a break from social media and online spaces to spend some time in my body in the world.

I wrote over on my personal blog this week about why I’m taking a break from words; what our embodied God means to me; and how you can stay in touch with me this Lent!

Excerpt from Giving Up Words for Lent.

There is a smallness to being a body that words can try to hide.

The best and most true words are the ones that bring us back to our bodies, and remind us that we’re small.

The best words – song lyrics, poems, sermons, novels – bring us to what is very small, very human, and settle us in there, like sliding into our favorite pair of jeans. We feel that the smallness is true, that the smallness fits us. There is humility and safety in smallness, in ashes on our foreheads while our stomach rumbles. There is a humility in the Bread and Wine that’s just a loaf and $5 bottle bought from Kroger. There’s humility in the fact that sex is sometimes awkward and silly, that some of us bite our fingernails, that one day our bodies will start to fail and we’ll stop remembering words, just like we had to learn words as kids.

Dust again.

But dust that was created by God. Dust that is valued by God – the same God who, in a literally dusty corner of the earth, took on a dust-made Body to be with us.

You are so small, Beloved, and so loved.

You are so human, Beloved, and once, I was too.

You will die, Beloved, and so did I.

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