Bishop Barry Beisner’s Message
Welcome!
Welcome to the Episcopal Church in Navajoland, a Missionary Diocese of the Episcopal Church!
We are a community of Christians walking the sacred path of the Beauty Way, following Jesus in
reconciliation, harmony, and right relationship with our Creator and with all creation.
We invite you to join us on this journey. May your visit here be a blessing, and may God draw us
ever closer together in Christ, guiding us all as we walk with him in the Beauty Way.
Lenten Message
Dear Friends in Christ:
The turning circle of the seasons now brings us once again to Lent and Holy Week. In my personal preparations for this time, I have been impressed at how beautifully our Mission Prayer serves to focus and underscore our Church’s traditional emphases.
“We set out to walk in harmony, seeking forgiveness and wholeness.”
Our Liturgy for Ash Wednesday reminds us of “the need which all Christians have to renew their repentance and faith,” and therefore calls us “to the observance of a holy Lent, by self-examination and repentance; by prayer, fasting, and self-denial; and by reading and meditating on God’s holy Word.“ The cross of ashes marked on our foreheads further reminds us that we are completely dependent upon God for the grace and power to become who we are created to be: beloved children of God, who receive from the God who loves us the abundant and eternal gift of life. The gift of harmony with God.
“Through compassion and service, love binds us in relationship with all creation.”
Lent is for repentance: seeing how our ways of thinking and acting might be out of harmony with God’s intentions for us, and turning to God for help to change those ways. Our repentance is always deeply personal—no one else can do it for us—but never completely private, in the sense that the renewal of harmony in our lives impacts everything and everyone our lives connect with. We are our true selves, not in isolation, but in relationship. Lent is for interior work, heart-work, but also for the work of justice, healing, and peace for all of God’s creation. This is the pattern, the rhythm of Lent: we turn inward to be in right relationship with God, in order to turn outward, becoming partners with Christ as He restores the world.
That work of restoration means that Lent never loses touch with Easter. We keep our public Alleluias silent for a season. Still, the power of Christ’s resurrection and the joy that it brings to all creation are not absent from us. As one of the Eucharistic Prefaces for Lent prays: “You bid your faithful people cleanse their hearts, and prepare with joy for the Paschal Feast.”
“In the Beauty Way all is restored again.”
That restoration is the whole point of Lent and Holy Week. (And Easter, too.)
May this Lent and Holy Week be a time of spiritual growth for you, a time of renewal and refreshment for the work that lies before us. May this season increase our capacity for Easter joy.
I invite you, therefore, in the name of the Church, to the observance of a holy Lent.
Grace and peace,
+Barry
Contact Information
PO Box 720
Farmington, NM 87499
info@ecofnavajoland.org
505.327.7549