Lenten breathing exercises

Here we are in the home stretch of Lent.  This time next week, we’ll be blessing palms and preparing to remember Jesus’ entry into Jerusalem during that fateful week.  We’re preparing to re-member.  Literally, to put back together.  Like the miraculous gathering of the dry bones in Ezekiel’s vision, we’re preparing to bring back together memories and pieces of ourselves into our collective body… a body that is meant to join with Christ in the final walk to the cross… in his death…. and in his resurrection. 

And, key to our hearing what the Spirit is saying to us today is breath… the very breath of God: רוּחַ ruach (or ‘pneuma’) -  spirit, wind, breath.

The breath of God moved over the primordial waters to beget creation.  God breathed his breath – life giving Spirit – into the nostrils of the first humans.  God’s breath, the Spirit, is blown into us as divine wind, capable of bringing back to life what is otherwise thought to be dead.

The Spirit moves in and through us every moment of every day. Our very breath is of God. 

FIRST BREATHING EXERCISE: (inhale) “In the beginning” (exhale) “God breathed”

Before we can embrace the resurrection at Easter, we’re called to be in touch with death.  We began Lent with the words, “Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.”  This week, we’re revisiting this notion of dead dust.  We’re with Ezekiel in a valley of dry bones.  We’re with Mary, Martha, and others who are grieving the death of a loved one, viscerally aware of a tomb that looms in front of us. We hold this sense of things that die alongside the promise of the power of God’s breath to enliven.  I’m going to talk a little about death – literal and metaphysical – and invite you into breathing exercises and a short mediation.

I offer some personal testimony that is relevant to today’s reading from Ezekiel and the Gospel story about Lazarus.  Ten years ago, while living and working in New York City, where I also volunteered with a hospice program, I experienced two significant events that have continued to shape my understanding of death and life with Christ.  In 2001, I experienced the impact of 9/11 in NYC and unexpected unemployment – thrown into a valley of the shadow of death literally and metaphorically.  “Ashes to ashes and dust to dust” was very vivid toward the end of 2001… as was the promise of rejuvenation and resuscitation in/with the body of Christ.

Over the next decade, my encounter with physical deaths continued as my work with hospice continued, and fittingly, some of my own friends and family would die in hospice care:  (samples from personal necrology... including deaths of family in Wichita, KS)

I’ve dealt physically with dead bodies, removing/replacing soiled clothes, wrapping corpses in sheets, witnessing the cremation of bodies, handling bone fragments and ashen remains, and I’ve assisting with burial services.

I share these personal experiences to say that when we hear about the desolation of loss in the valley of dry bones, and about the grieving at a tomb in which a loved one has been recently placed, I’m ‘there’.  And, perhaps like some of you, I’ve wondered at times where God is/was in such experiences.  If only these people could have lived a little longer.  If only they hadn’t had to suffer like that.  If only Jesus could have come sooner. 

Listening to today’s readings, I’m reminded that our Lord – our God incarnate among us – has shared in our grief physically – he knows intimately how we feel in those moments.  One of the shortest sentences in the Bible tells us how God reacted when faced with the death of a loved one and the grief all around that moment – “Jesus wept.”  And, at the moment of his own death, Jesus uses is own last human breath to call out to God.

And, we believe that death is not the end of the story in our faith.  It might not happen in the time frame that we want it to, but we’re assured that we’ll enjoy life together beyond physical death.

Through God’s own breath, there is resuscitation and resurrection for the faithful. 

SECOND BREATHING EXERCISE: Remembering your loved ones who have died… (inhale) “As we walk through the valley” (exhale) “Our Lord is with us”

This brings us to metaphor. 

Early in 2001, I was baptized – that moment marked a death of part of my life and the emergence of new life in Christ… that has culminated a decade later in the move from a career that was sucking life from me into a vocation that has me feeling more alive than ever. 

Ezekiel shared his vision during a time when the people he was speaking to were very much in a valley of death.  They were captives in exile in a strange land. Everything they had known and loved lay in ruins back in Jerusalem.  Blame, judgment, and guilt mixed with their chronic grief. Ezekiel’s vivid vision of God reassembling a scattered people thought to be very dead inspired new hope. 


As the vision of Ezekiel tell us, and as some interpret the sign of Lazarus’ resurrection to suggest, we don’t have to wait until ‘some day’ to experience new life together as a body with Christ.   Each day, there’s the potential that we can be brought back to new life here and now.

Nothing is too far gone that it can’t be saved by God. No matter how dry and scattered the remains, no matter how deep the hole, no matter how dark the tomb, God can and will revive what has been dead, even if from only the very smallest fragments of our faith.

So that we might all see and believe the power of God’s promise of life to us through Christ, through his breath he calls out with holy confidence to Lazarus and to us: 

Arise.  Come out.  Unbind each other.  Be free.  Live and love again.

Consider what feels dead in your life – what scattered bones lay around you; what has been shut up in a tomb that needs to be brought back into the light of life?

Reflect on what has been lost in your life… and hear what the Spirit is saying to God’s people.

THIRD/FINAL BREATHING EXERCISE: (inhale) “We believe” (exhale) “In new life through the breath of God”

Things thought to be dead can be raised up.  We will be reunited with loved ones who have died… and we can be reunited with those who have been thought of as too far gone.  As a faithful people who sometimes get scattered in the valley, we can be brought back together. 

As we prepare for Holy Week consider the hope and promise in these words: resuscitation, restoration, rest, renewal, rebirth, rejuvenation, and resurrection.

Get in touch with how hungry you are for this… how you yearn, like Ezekiel and those who loved Lazarus, to have God breathe new life into us.

"Mortal, can these bones live?... Prophesy to these bones, and say to them: O dry bones, hear the word of the Lord. Thus says the Lord GOD to these bones: I will cause breath to enter you, and you shall live.” 

AMEN