Falling in Love With Lent

 “Always fall in love with what you're asked to accept. Take what is given and make it over your way. My aim in life has always been to hold my own with whatever's going. Not against; with.”

         —Robert Frost

 

No one needs to point out one more time that it hasn’t been an easy year, or enumerate the experiences and ones we’ve lost in the course of it.  I’ve heard many spiritually devout mutter, upon washing the ashes off their foreheads, that they didn’t feel like giving anything up for Lent this time around – such a discipline being redundant amidst enduring quarantine precautions. We’ve been “giving things up” for the last 12 months.

 

It’s true, of course.  Lent took hold a year ago and never let go.  We may have taken a few determined moments to hum a hallelujah when the calendar announced that it was Easter, but it was a forced refrain.  It didn’t feel like any stone had been rolled away, and so we settled back into our Wednesday ashes.  Here we are now, twelve months later, still in the throes of Lent.  Sure, one after another silly politician tells us that the sun is shining and the water’s warm and we should jump right in.  But as a friend of mine recently observed, once you’ve grabbed a live wire, it’s hard to approach, let alone put your hand again on, an electric fence regardless of who might be assuring us that it is turned off. 

 

The season of Lent continues…

 

…which is a richer, more generative observation than it sounds.  Though Lent has largely been reduced, in our understanding, to an onerous and obligatory season of sacrifice, its real purpose is examination, clarification, and realignment with the core of who we are and are called to be.  Jesus was driven into the wilderness – the biblical story that informs the season of Lent – not to subject himself to deprivation “because it would be good for him,” but to distill and clarify the values by which he would live out his life.  The prophet Jeremiah would say that Jesus was setting a personal plumb line. 

 

If Jesus went about that reflective work of his own volition, we have had the wilderness imposed upon us.  One day we were laughing and playing and going about our routines.  The next day the doors were closed and we were working from home.  One day we were healthy and slaying the dragons.  The next, we were constantly taking our temperature, wearing masks and lamenting the loss of those whose death we couldn’t gather to solemnize.  But along the way we have done more than grieve and take precautions and feel afraid.  Like Jesus in the wilderness, we have sorted through our circumstances and selves and separated into piles the “essentials” to keep and the “unnecessary accretions” to set aside.  We’ve baked more bread, made more meals, planted more gardens, and talked with one another about important things.  

 

Not entirely, of course.  Overlaying all this has been a poisonous political season that made a global pandemic seem like a bedtime story.  In the conduct of it we have learned that it will take more than a deadly and paralyzing calamity to break up the sedimented thinking and behaviors that have hardened portions of our hearts and lives and the spaces between us.  

 

Still, in breathtaking ways the Lenten pandemic has sifted us, stripped us, stilled us, worked on us, clarified us; pushed us, of necessity, to reevaluate, reimagine, and innovate.  Not everyone, to be sure.  Some have never ceased to kick and scream and whine.  Countless shops and bars and eateries have closed, the victims of financial starvation.  

 

But there are others who channeled the resilient spirit of Robert Frost – who may not have “fallen in love with” what we’ve been asked to accept, but have accepted it, nonetheless, and worked with it rather than against it.  I think of the restaurants that have found new ways to set virtual tables; businesses that created new pathways to serve their customers; musicians and theatre groups who have created new “stages” on which to perform; churches who have done more than point a jerky camera at a talking head and have created altogether new and beautiful experiences of worship that are more than makeshift, and which evocatively, aesthetically connect with the spiritually hungry far beyond their immediate neighborhood or town.  These, the resilient among us, have leaned into working “with” instead of “against.”  And my guess is – my prayer is – that much of who we have become and much we have trained ourselves to see will endure.

 

We’ve learned some things, in other words, about ourselves and each other, pried away from the present to attend to the possible.

 

Precisely what the season of Lent is supposed to accomplish in and among us.  And if it has taken a year to accomplish it instead of the requisite six weeks, well, the garden was worth planting and the bread was worth baking; the meals were worth preparing and the conversations were worth having.  And who knows what else about all we've been forced to accept we will discover we've come to love.  Surely that warrants a modest pre-Easter "Hallelujah".