(Image description: a figurine of the Virgin Mary in a box surrounded by small dried flowers, herbs and greenery)
In popular imagination, Lent has a decidedly gloomy tinge. Expectations are that when someone is practicing Lent, they are “giving things up” – often small luxuries like chocolate or alcohol. Happily, many voices in the church encourage other possible practices, pointing to the earliest exhortations to Lenten disciples to include almsgiving, study and doing good works as part of their journey through the Church year’s desert. I know of folks who call Lent “spring training” or “spring cleaning,” inviting us to gaze through a lens of purification and strengthening for the challenges of Holy Week, where we’ll ritually re-enact Christ’s final days amongst his friends and students before his execution – if done with real attention, a gut-wrenching process.
I’m glad for all these paths to a more positive Lent, focused on building joyful and life-giving practices… but I have to say, these approaches haven’t always borne the best fruit for me. Like many of you, I hear the relentless drumbeat of Continuous Improvement from our culture, continually reminding me of all the ways I could and should improve myself every day (…and all the things I ought to buy to help accomplish them). Trying to add another practice – even one designed for my soul’s health and the good of those around me – well, it just feels like another Monday. Another weight. Another thing to squeeze into my schedule.
And I want to examine what’s life-giving about giving things up. It can often feel like being deprived or punished – and God knows none of us like that. Having things taken away has been used by those with power over us to make us feel unworthy, to curb our questioning or “disobedience,” or to assert that our desires are ugly or unimportant. To claim our needs and desires wholeheartedly are a life’s work for many of us raised to be “selfless,” in a way that diminished our capacity to find the nourishment required to build a self that can fully, joyfully, and sustainably share gifts with others.
Transformative Lenten practices for me have most often been the ones where I have chosen to “give up” something I think is getting in the way of my journey with and to God. I get a chance to answer a question for myself – what would it be like to walk without this burden? What would I see if I lowered this barrier? What is getting in my way, and what is it like to live without it for a season?
What weight can I put down?
What distraction can I put aside?
What thing can I give up that I don’t want anymore, that I think is maybe hurting me?
And it’s just for a season. Just for a season.
That being said, I am adding a daily practice as my Lenten discipline this year – but it is targeting something that I don’t want, and that isn’t good for me: my lack of confidence and unwillingness to get back to the page in my writing. I have had a monumental case of the winter blahs (not helped by being snow and ice-bound for ten days in January), and I am finding it a hike of epic proportions to get back to my writing projects. I know from past experience that once I get to the page, I’m delighted by what I find and it all goes swimmingly, but until I do, every step feels like wearing lead boots.
So I am making the tiniest, safest, easiest return to the page possible during Lent: I am writing a haiku every day. 5-7-5. It’s got structure, it can be about anything, and you can absolutely tell when you’re done. And it is a seventeen syllable proof that actually I do know how to put words together, and have not been deluding myself for the past 50+ years about my vocation…
Here’s my opening entry, on the Stella Maris figurine I received this week (see photo above):
Layers of sweetness
Unfolding subtly as love
Fragrant jewelled star
Friends who are practicing Lent, may you find something beautiful to take up, or something tiring to put down. Friends who aren’t, may you enjoy the delight of returning sun and be on the look-out for new buds.
Thanks, Pam!
Thank you! Next yest i will tey picking up, right now I'm putting down swearing. Mostly as an act of anger, humor is fine, but anything that is used in anger is, IMHO, is wrong anfld hurtful to my heart, soul and sanity. Thank you fo3 yoir encouragement and insight into the Lenten practice.