Lenten Reflection - March 6, 2025. “Pandora’s Box and Us”

Today the news has me thinking, hard, of the legend of Pandora’s box. This ancient Greek story describes how Pandora, entrusted with a container, opens it and lets out sickness, death, and other evils into the world. In horror she tried to close the box again, but the damage was done. Looking into it, the one thing that remained was hope.

Sometimes, watching the news of late, I feel like all those spirits are swirling around. People are jumpy, alarmed, afraid of what could happen. Ever since the onset of the pandemic, it’s felt this way, and now in a time of uncertainty and alienation that jumpiness has erupted into anger, impatience, and self-centered thinking. All you have to do to know this is to spend an hour or so in traffic. Hope seems like weak medicine in the face of the spiritual ailments of the world.

Yesterday I reflected on how the awareness that our lives are finite could make things more important, could give more significant to this moment. Today, I’m thinking how hope in the power of love and compassion can move us to explore what it is to love our neighbor, to care for the last and the least, to pray even for those who persecute us.  That hope is that the true light of love revealed by God’s grace-filled acts (or the acts of lovingkindness that fills the universe if you are opposed to a theistic vocabulary)—that light cannot be put out. 

The days are getting longer.  Even through the vagaries of a Michigan spring, I can see trees budding, bulbs starting to peek up through the dirt—life returning. I encourage you to look to how renewal comes in cycles, and to look for renewal even in the midst of difficult and frightening times. Or, as Paul puts it in Romans 5:3-5, 

3 We can rejoice, too, when we run into problems and trials, for we know that they help us develop endurance. 4 And endurance develops strength of character, and character strengthens our confident hope of salvation. 5 And this hope will not lead to disappointment.

We are not lost, or abandoned, or without any hope. We can find it in the midst of our problems and trials, and as we face them, we can discover that hope in the power of love is the last thing left in the box, at the bottom of it all….and it does not disappoint us.