Colcannon as Metaphor for Spiritual Life

Here we are, racing to Holy Week.  Where has the season of Lent gone?

You may be feeling a bit of blah-ness or despair these days.  Many of us live in places where winter refuses to relent, which might be coloring our mood.  Many of us remember a more vibrant past.  Our thoughts might turn to all the ways our church disappoints us.

If you're feeling this way, I wrote this piece that appears on the Living Lutheran site just for you.  It looks at our spiritual lives as colcannon.

What is colcannon, you ask?  It's an Irish dish made of mashed potatoes and cabbage, a dish that disappointed me when I first made it years ago.

It's perfectly nourishing, no doubt.  It doesn't taste hideous, like spoiled food.  It's just not glamorous.

In some ways, our spiritual lives are similar:

"Many of us navigated toward a spiritual life with certain expectations. Maybe we remembered the churches of our childhoods: packed sanctuaries on Sundays and bountiful potluck dinners and vibrant youth groups. Or maybe we hoped to find inspiration to lead us to our better selves. Perhaps we wanted to learn to pray better or to be less judgmental. Maybe we yearned for grand choirs with brass ensembles that come in for special occasions.


In the meantime, we’ve had to learn to live with what we actually have on our plates for dinner. We don’t attend the churches that our grandparents had. We may sit in pews that are mostly empty. We may wonder where all the youth went. Maybe we have a decent choir, but we wish we had a good Sunday school for adults. Or maybe no aspect of the church is as glorious as we wanted it to be."

But there is hope.  Go here to find out how to shift your thinking about the colcannon that is your spiritual life.