Lent: Growing Season
Sea of Galilee, 2005 ©
Does Lent have anything to offer Protestants?
Lent: a period of fasting and regret, 40 weekdays lasting from Ash Wednesday to Holy Saturday
To those who subscribe to my blog, you may have thought that I fasted from writing blogs during Lent. Not so. Although I do regret the weeks I did not post, I wish I could claim a noble cause. Or even tell the what and why, but no matter.
I’m doing the best I can, making choices each day, unable to do even half what think I can do, hoping to establish a pattern that doesn’t require “teeth-gritting discipline to get me through.” [1]
In a previous blog post on Ash Wednesday, I wrote about three books I had chosen to read during Lent. Rather than focus on giving up something, (or focusing on regrets), I chose to add these books as guides to prepare my heart and soul for Easter.
However, I did set aside all social media. At first, this was hard. Reaching for my phone, checking an app had become a habit. And last week, I started receiving emails from Instagram telling me that I’m missing things, tempting me to see what’s up with people I follow.
Somewhere out there, I realize some wizard or some AI uses technology to capture, misdirect, and divert my attention away from life as I live it, “every, every minute” (Our Town).
The author of one of the three books I read, Simplifying the Soul, Lenten Practices to Renew Your Spirit, suggested practices that make better use of the limited time each of us has.
A different practical “practice” was suggested for each of the 40 days of Lent.
From cleaning out a drawer or closet in order to simplify space; to spend a day without TV or whatever artificially stimulates the mind; to take a hard look at the length of my to-do list in order to simplify schedule; to read and reread the Bible not as an intellectual exercise but to ruminate/meditate until the words resonate, leading me to respond to God’s Word, from physical to cerebral, she put a lot of life into this little book.
Prayer and solitude, two other practices, contribute to simplifying the mind.
I made haphazard attempts at a few suggestions, not because I wanted to congratulate myself (I know better), but sometimes timing reinforces a good idea.
“… we quietly accept the truth of who we are: weak human beings, prone to fail and tempted toward evil, yet at the same time, filled with an almost unbearable longing for goodness, love, and intimacy with God.”
Spiritual growth, I realize, is a process, not an event. Yet it remains in my power to choose practices that aid this process.
For example, I’m the only person with the power to resist “the Borg” (Star Trek), a futuristic cyberspace creation that gobbles up whole worlds so that no one can think for themself.
Once bound to the cultural collective, there’s a price to pay for choices, including how I spend my time. Even if “everybody is doing it,” and FOMO (fear of missing out) creates in me a hunger to know what it is that everybody else is doing, gradually, and almost imperceptibly, I can lose pieces of my unique identity.
Starting the day by directing my thoughts to ideas written in books by people who lived and died before I got here helps me combat dysregulation of my soul that occurs from taking in too much current information without giving time to reflect and process some of what other people seek to digest for me.
A Time to Reset
“The first hour is the rudder of the day.”
In this season of my life, I have the luxury of starting most days with time to read and think.
When I was younger, it was popular to emphasize a daily “Quiet Time.” Back when, not only was having a QT an effort to observe daily (before the day’s scheduled obligations took over), that’s when, like Paula Huston, “I counted on my teeth-gritting discipline to get me through.” Checklists and heroic attempts.
Now instead of counting the minutes, I want the minutes to count.
This Mary Oliver poem resonated deeply, so that I wrote out the whole poem in my journal. Perhaps the title “When Death Comes” sounds off-putting, yet the Bible repeatedly emphasizes the appointment each person is scheduled to keep.
What Mary Oliver focuses on beyond the inevitable is the way she wants to meet death when it comes.
. . . I want to step through the door full of curiosity, wondering:What is it going to be like, that cottage of darkness?And therefore I look upon everything as a brotherhood and a sisterhood, and I look upon time as no more than an idea, and I consider eternity as another possibility, and I think of each life as a flower, as commonas a field daisy, and as singularand each name a comfortable music in the mouth, tending as all music does, toward silence, and each body a lion of courage, and something precious to the earth. When it’s over, I want to say: all my lifeI was a bride married to amazement. I was a bridegroom, taking the world into my arms. When it’s over, I don’t want to wonderif I have made of my life something particular, and real. I don’t want to find myself sighing and frightened, or full of argument. I don’t want to end up simply having visited this world.I underlined the words “I want” and “I don’t want,” reminders that the choices I make are limited by time. I need to think about what I want and what I don’t.
I especially like and marked the part: “each name . . . and each body . . . precious,” the sound of those names “comfortable music in the mouth, tending as all music does, toward silence.”
This made me think of prayers for people, how sometimes a prayer is as brief as just saying a person’s name––and the silence that follows can show I trust God hears and answers, believing that simply the sound of people’s names rises like music to God’s ears.
“Behold, the LORD’s hand is not shortened, that it cannot save; neither is His ear heavy, that it cannot hear.”
And linked to a conversation I had had before reading this poem, I repeated someone’s name––held space for the needs I knew this person faces, reflected on the love that binds hearts and lives far beyond years and proximity.
Doors to Notre Dame Cathedral before the fire; 12 disciples surround Jesus ©
Vision Correction
“You can never tell to what untold glories any little humble path may lead, if only you follow far enough. ”
Over the course of a few weeks, these three books have helped prepare me for Easter.
He is Risen! He is Risen indeed!
As a Protestant in a denomination that does not observe or teach about Lent, I’m sure I didn’t actually practice Lent in any official or historical sense. Yet giving myself permission and space to explore––to think about what I want to do with the rest of this one precious life God has given me––this season of preparation has helped me focus.
“Through the tender mercy of our God; whereby the dayspring from on high hath visited us, To give light to them that sit in darkness and in the shadow of death, to guide our feet into the way of peace.”
This Easter, may your feet be guided into the way of peace––because of Jesus Christ.
[1] Paula Huston, Simplifying the Soul