Lent Meditation: Day 31- March 20, 2026

📖 Scripture Verse

I am like an owl of the wilderness,

like a little owl of the waste places.

I lie awake;

I am like a lonely bird on the housetop.

—Psalm 102:6-7

🕯️Meditation

This psalm evokes loneliness and isolation with this avian image: the spooky call of an owl in the wild places of this world—one that you might hear and feel your own fragility and mortality.  In her 1967 novel, I Heard the Owl Call My Name, Margaret Craven tells the story of a young priest with a terminal illness who is sent by his bishop to a rural Native American village in the Pacific Northwest to learn about his own mortality and the meaning of life before his dies.  The villagers learn to accept his ministry and he learns to be their priest, and then he learns that he is dying:

“Under a green spruce Marta stood by herself, her eyes on the young vicar. How thin and white he was! How long had it been there—that look on his face she had seen many times in her long life and knew well? It was not the hard winter that had placed it there. It was death reaching out his hand, touching the face gently, even before the owl had called the name.” — I Heard the Owl Call My Name, Margaret Craven

The loneliness and frailty that is made known so poignantly in these verses from the psalms is one of the lessons of Lent for all of us—the call of the owl, the reminder that we are dust and to dust we shall return.  It is in recognizing and accepting our mortality, with all the bittersweetness that this entails that frees us to live well in the present.  Our awareness of death gives us the gift of meaningful life now.

🙏 Prayer

Lord of Life, teach me to know the frailty and uncertainty of my life, not that I may despair of loss, but so that I may rejoice in the gift of the present moment; through Jesus Christ. Amen

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