Beginning Lent Even as We Are Living in Lent
We’re only a few days away from the beginning of Lent. This Wednesday, February 17, is Ash Wednesday and I’ve been joyfully creating a space here on the website for those of you who’d like to join me look, listen, read, pray, and do meaningful practices for the 40+ days of Lent.
Would you like to walk with me through Lent? You can either subscribe to the Daybook Meditations membership ($5 a month) to receive the daily devotional guide in your email inbox and/or purchase a pdf with the entire guide in one download.
To join in, subscribe to the newly-formed Daybook Meditations membership. Each day you’ll receive in your email inbox a meditation to help orient your heart, mind, and body toward the coming resurrection. Each meditation leading up to Holy Week centers around the day’s Scripture passages and includes a work of art, song, prayer, and a simple practice to help you look, listen, read, pray, and do the simple practices of a prayerful Lent.
If your friends or family would like a devotional guide for Lent but becoming a Daybook Meditations member isn't a good fit right now, the Lent Daybook 2021 pdf download is the next best thing. Because of space limitations, there are some minor differences from the blog format, but all of the art, song, Scripture, prayer links are included for all 40 days of Lent.
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Do we have to give up more when we’ve already given up so much?
This is the question a friend asked during a Sacramental Life Community - In Person conversation. One week before Lent we were considering what it means to enter Lent this year when we’ve been living almost a year underneath layers of relentless loss in a global pandemic.
As I’ve been reflecting on our conversation, my answer to her honest question is “I don’t know”. I’ve heard folks in the midst of extreme personal suffering describing their circumstances as a continual Lent. I think that’s a fair description of the last year for all of us.
When I say “I don’t know”, I don’t mean “I don’t know what the proper religious response is”. Observing and practicing the liturgical year isn’t a Jesus mandate. It’s a church tradition formed through centuries to help us pay attention to Jesus’ own life, death, burial, resurrection, and ascension. As a global Church waiting for Christ to finally once and for all return and restore all things to right, we’ve made an agreement to mark time together through this peculiar calendar.
Why Lent - this year or any year?
When we celebrate the liturgical seasons, we grow not only in our knowledge of Scripture, but we learn also how to embody its life-giving truth. In the wisdom of our Church fathers and mothers - themselves informed by the collective memory of millennia of Jewish feasts and fasts initiated by the Creator - each liturgical season marks itself with daily, physical practices.
The practices serve to remind us day in and day out that we are not just gritting our teeth until we are released from these bodies, like an unwanted overcoat, when we die. Nor are we merely defined by the physical matter that just happens to contain a spiritual being for those who care about those things.
In the accounts of the Incarnated Christ we read throughout the whole scope of Christ’s life as rehearsed during Advent, Christmas and Epiphany, Lent, and Eastertide we discover year after year a Christ, God made Man, who is not either body or spirit, but both body and spirit. In Pentecost and Ordinary Time we rehearse what it means to become more like Jesus, who is fully alive as both God and man and is seated at the right hand of the Father, interceding for us. We learn to live like Jesus - heart, mind, and body - waiting for that final reconciliation with God. By God’s grace, we become more like our own true selves as we grow more and more like Christ.
In many ways, when we talk about the spiritual practices of fasting, confessing, and giving associated with Lent, we mean just that, practice. If the point is to be ready for that day when we see Jesus again in his risen, reigning self, what better way to prepare than to practice? And what better way to practice than with a community of brothers and sisters all around the world, keeping time together as our church mothers and fathers recommended?
Sometimes, though, as my friend lamented, we don’t need to practice the kind of suffering Jesus taught us because our circumstances have fully immersed us in suffering. A person living with a terminal illness doesn’t need to place ash on her forehead to be reminded about the short span of mortality. Her failing body actively tells her that truth every moment. Those of us nearby are reminded with physical evidence of death more visible and powerful a testimony than any charcoal smudge on her face could tell.
The thing is, we have a powerful tendency to look away from death. Even when we’re living in a world where millions of people have died one after another after another after another, we might have found a way to buffer ourselves from this reality. For this reason, as I’ve considered the question “Do we need to give up more when we’ve already given up so much?” I think the answer for some of us is “Probably”.
We might need to give up a few of the items that keep us disconnected from the reality of death in order to practice for our own. It’s a grace that we’re so marvelously adept at filling in those gaps of loss with replacement comforts. When we look back at this pandemic someday, I suspect the gifts of this time will become more evident. We’re also at risk of looking back with a rose-colored perspective the ways we’ve learned to collectively cope with the trauma of coronavirus.
Maybe this Lent we get to practice recognizing the graces that have come now instead of waiting for a future day when we might be tempted to sentimentalize them? Maybe taking a couple of weeks to give up one or two of the things that have felt almost like salvation during so much loss will help us discern what’s actually giving us life. With this clarity, we’ll be renewed to return wholeheartedly to those life-giving things the moment the Resurrection Sunday bells ring.
And maybe this practice will help us discern the counterfeit comforts getting us through this time that we can leave behind like Lazarus’ grave clothes.
“Lent is not intended to be an annual ordeal during which we begrudgingly forgo a handful of pleasures. It is meant to be the church’s springtime, a time when, out of the darkness of sin’s winter, a repentant, empowered people emerges.
Put another way, Lent is the season in which we ought to be surprised by joy. Our self-sacrifices serve no purpose unless, by laying aside this or that desire, we are able to focus on our heart’s deepest longing: unity with Christ. In him—in his suffering and death, his resurrection and triumph—we find our truest joy.”
How does practicing Lent prepare us for resurrection?
Lent helps us remember that death is a reality we must face, but the point of this remembrance is to fully anticipate and prepare for life. Even the word Lent which literally means “spring” points us toward resurrection.
Jesus, our perfect example, hated death and did not look forward to his own even knowing that God would bring him alive from the tomb after three days. Jesus practiced for Good Friday by going into the wilderness for forty days. Whatever he learned by this obedience prepared him - physically, emotionally, relationally, and spiritually - for all that God had given him to do in both his life and his death.
Because of Jesus, the end for us is not death, but life. Lent isn’t about performing a ritual, it’s about making the ground of our hearts, minds, and bodies ready to bear life. More than ever, maybe this is a year we need the practices of Lent to reorient us toward life.
To be able to fully rejoice in resurrection, we have to be honest about what’s impeding life. What’s wrong in our own hearts, in the world, and in our churches. We follow along with Jesus as he entered every one of those spaces with clear eyes, naming what need to be named, asking the Father for what needed to be healed, obeying what needed to be obeyed in order to bring life for all of us. We get to be like Jesus this way.
We need to practice the way of Jesus not just at an intellectual level but with our whole selves - body, mind, and spirit. We ask God to enlarge our imagination to see all of these places - the world, the church, and our own hearts - the way God sees them. We want to search and know just as we ask God to search and know us. In the process, we become more like Jesus and more like the true selves God’s always imagined us to be. May the rhythms of the Lent Daybook Meditations I’ve curated for us this year reflect this desire to look into rather than away from what’s true in order to be able to live more fully into a loving, fruitful life
A special note about Holy Week
From Palm Sunday, March 28, through Holy Saturday, April 3, we add a focus on the litany of last words Jesus spoke from the cross, traditionally known as the Seven Last Words of Christ. Each year during Holy Week I invite several friends to share their own experience of suffering in response to the final words of Christ. The guest writers tell stories of walking with Jesus on the path of suffering and include every sort of mourning - illness, relational disillusionment, anxiety, joblessness, death of loved ones, death of dearly-held dreams. Their stories have helped form me in my understanding of suffering and I believe they could also encourage you too.
This is a highlight of the year for me on the blog and 2021 is our ninth year helping each other retrieve a Christlike lament for the brokenness of our lives and world. You can read each of the 7 reflections by subscribing to a Stories membership.
Here are a few posts I’ve written on this blog over the years to help us prepare.