Cultivate simplicity. Learn to communicate in non-verbal ways. When you use words, have them say what you mean. If there is a key to your mystery, let people have it so they can understand you.

One by one, we were placed under arrest and taken to jail. An 11-hour incarceration followed. I was chained to a bench while also handcuffed to another prisoner. The hours grew longer and longer. I meditated. I prayed. I asked for help because I felt helpless.

The waste and agony of dying are all around us. Death has come to mean an impersonal body count. Horror stories fill TV screens and usurp press headlines. How can we simply go on as if this kind of tragedy were absent?

Its trunk seems sturdier than some belief systems. Its branches are hospitable and inviting. I'm aware of my age and accompanying collection of aches and pains. These are also litanies of anxiety that seem to have marked my being.

Still, echoes of all those Lenten 'shoulds' reverberate through my mind and heart. If I am to strike 'discipline' from my theological lexicon, then what am I to do this Lent?

When a life sentence stands between a child and redemption, it's a cross of sorrow we all bear. When we adults allow the penalty to get the best of an imprisoned child, we all lose.

So the celebration of Easter is not about giving up Lent -- just like Lent wasn't about giving up Easter. It is all part of the same holy rhythm of discerning enough and learning what life together really means.

A couple years ago I thought, why should college basketball fans have all the fun while we Christians sit around giving up chocolate? Thus Lent Madness was born.

We, too, have a chance to think things over, whether or not we really stop or slow down our normal lives for a period of time.

Taking Lent seriously means recognizing and seeking to break those fasts. It means not taking the Easter celebration and relief for granted.

While many choose to journey through Lent with fasting or generosity as the tools for considering our human dustiness, I choose to journey into the wild finitude with words.

I am convinced that when Lent moves from just "giving up" or fasting to "feasting" on good habits, the transformation can be truly amazing!

Lent is like an excursion into the wilderness during which I leave my familiar dependencies to embrace silence, solitude, and deprivation beyond the daily attractions and distractions that shape my life.

What does it profit anyone to gain the whole world but lose one's soul? This haunting question was an echo of Jesus' temptation in the wilderness.

Sometimes, it is only in darkness that we can really see clearly. I look up at the sky on an Irish mountainside and the night is alive with light -- piercing, penetrating, gleaming light.

Penance for me over the past week has meant re-immersing myself again and again in conversation with Christ, each time hearing God's invitation more clearly to be the source of my ongoing healing.

Light and dark are the colors of life. No life is ever all of one or all of the other. On the contrary. Life is the interplay, the dialogue, the interpreter between the two.

Every year, the church reminds us to observe an intentional season of introspection during the season of Lent. Ash Wednesday follows Fat Tuesday and launches this season, urging Christians to engage self-regulation.

This is the real "try harder" that applies to Lent, and its ultimate irony is that it is not a trying at all, but an ultimate surrendering, dying, and foundational letting go.

The 40 days of Lent that lead to Easter are the most sacred and spiritually powerful in the Christian calendar. From the Ash Wednesday reminder to 'r...