Straight are the paths of the Lord; in them the just walk, but sinners stumble in them.

I am, I have to say, a stumbler, both in the metaphorical sense and in the literal one. (I’m still nursing a nasty bruise on my shin from a spectacular fall I took a couple of weeks ago going up the stairs of the Kline Geology Lab where I work. Somehow I managed to trip over absolutely nothing, sprawl inelegantly across the landing, and drop a full tumbler of morning coffee, in view of a horrified student who was working at a table nearby. Amazingly enough, the lid stayed on the tumbler and the coffee was salvaged, in stark contrast to my dignity). We all are, of course – I’ve always loved the bit in Proverbs about the just man falling seven times and getting right back up again – and one of the points of Lent is to reckon with the ways in which we stumble. Sometimes our (metaphorical) stumbles are small and quiet and maybe nobody notices except us and God, and sometimes they are big and nasty and noisy and the bruises we’ve inflicted, on ourselves or on others (or both!), are going to take a while to heal.

As a bona fide stumbler, I find the clarion call we hear in today’s Gospel reading awfully refreshing. Love the Lord your God with all your heart, and love your neighbor as yourself. It’s not that it’s easy to do, because God knows it’s not (at least for me!), but at least it’s a road map, you know? Rather than just stumbling around in the dark, we’re called to come out into the light that shines in the darkness, and we’re pointed towards the greatest of God’s commandments. I really wish that I had the understanding of the scribe in the story about how, exactly, I can really live this out each day in my own life – definitely still working on that. But I love the idea of these greatest of commandments as a lodestar for us as we all work our way through life, stumbles and all.