Lent #4 Sustaining the Soul

Overcoming Spiritual Malnutrition

A counsellor friend once told me that we spend a lot of time drawing down the water from our spiritual wells to the point that they run pretty well dry. Her suggestion was to develop practices to help fill up our wells so a sense of balance is regained. One of the great habits that restores our inner wells is to read the wise words of Jesus through the practice of lectio divina (or divine reading). To read— to meditate upon—the scriptures and other spiritual writings so they fill up our interior wells.

Lent is an opportunity for refilling the well and putting a hold on practices that run us dry—behaviours that are distracting, that pull us apart, that deplete our positive energy. We want to replace negative soul sucking appetites with constructive soul strengthening disciplines that fill up our personal aquifers—that let the waters flow freely to unloose the detritus that blocks our spiritual growth.

Robert Morneau knows about the need for replacing spiritual malnutrition with spiritual sustenance when he writes:

Some things are a matter of life or death, food being one example, air another. But the soul also needs to be sustained, and Jesus tells us that his words, listened to and appropriated, lead to eternal life. The reverse is also true: not to be nourished by God’s thoughts and life is to experience the deepest of deaths. Jesus is clear about his mission: the doing of his Father’s will. That will is that life might be experienced to the full so much so that even death becomes a divine instrument in the achievement of salvation.

Let us fill up our wells during this Lenten Season (there is still time!) Together let’s allow the words of Jesus to replenish our souls as he offers us his wellspring of hydration, “Let anyone who is thirsty come to me, and let the one who believes in me drink. As the scripture has said, “Out of the believers’s heart shall flow rivers of living water” (John 7:37-38).