This coming Wednesday – one week from today – begins an intentional journey inviting spiritual seekers to join in solidarity with suffering and all who suffer. It is a season to hold with honest generosity and curiosity the suffering one has endured, with the suffering one has inflicted.
Our ancestors’ practice of Lent was a purposeful blending of, and entering into Jesus’ 40 day fast in the desert, coupled with the what Christians came to call “Holy Week.” Holy Week began with Jesus Christ’s entry into Jerusalem on donkey’s back to palm branches waving and shouts of liberation and praise, his turning the tables on the religious powers in the temple, his humble washing of others’ feet, his announcement of the new covenant during the holy feast with his disciples, his betrayal with a kiss by a dear friend, his unjust arrest and faux trial, torture, mockery and execution, the deathly silence of his grave, his descent to the place of the dead, and the shock of Easter Sunday when God threw open his grave, and Christ is risen!
Lent can be a time which holds pain, loneliness, need, and suffering… even enters it. Sometimes Lent feels like a dare to look deeply at those things, people, systems, or parts of myself that I often wish to turn from or deny. A dare to move toward to those dark shadows and to – from the cross of own experience – ask my Heavenly Father to, “forgive them, for they know not what they do.” Lent is a season of profound truth telling; which is to say that it is a season often linked with the discovery of new freedom and new life. Somehow when when one goes to the places of hell and torment in our world or in one’s own story, the veil of secrecy is rent open; what was once an unspeakable holy-of-holies becomes not only visible but the ground of emancipation, belonging, and vocation.
Acceptance of what is, without denying its reality or escaping through fantasy is at the heart of my emerging imagination of Lent. How will I attend to what is? How might I welcome the real? What might descending to the darkest cells in the hell of my soul, borrowing Christ’s keys and freeing my captives invite?
Last year I leaned heavily on a helpful Lenten resource created and made available by Randy Woodley and the folks at Eloheh. So I was grateful to see that they have updated it for 2021. I commend it to you as a helpful guide. But remember, the dare still comes to us on a more personal and existential level, will we move toward the darkest corners in our soul, mind, body, in our relationships, neighborhoods, systems, and world? Will we move toward those things we usually wish to turn from? My sense is that resurrection life is possible only on the other side of death, but I am afraid, if it be God’s will, let this cup pass me by.
Peace, dwight
