Today is Ash Wednesday. I had every intention of getting up this morning and attending the Ash Wednesday service at my church – until the middle of last night, that is, when I started shaking with chills and fever, and making frequent trips to the restroom. I remarked to my wife (and I hope it was not too sacrilegious) that for me, today was really more of an Ass Wednesday. Still, there’s something weirdly appropriate with kicking off Lent with such a vivid, literal purging.
Lent has always occupied a strange place in my mind. Growing up I usually did it, though I was not entirely sure why. Then I began to encounter the Protestant backlash to Lent. People I spent time with began to question the practice. Was it right to bind the conscience of Christians like that? What exactly was fasting for 40 days supposed to accomplish? And, of course, the “ace in the hole” of a particularly noxious kind of Protestant: where’s Lent in the Bible?
Those things, combined (let’s be honest) with a certain laziness on my part, led me to abandon the practice of Lent for several years. Eventually though the pull towards it became strong in my mind, stronger even than my laziness. As I came back and reinstated the practice in my life, I began to cherish what I have come to see as the true meaning of Lent: the exercise of the spiritual imagination in such a way as to enter into Christ’s sufferings.
One common Protestant objection to Lent comes from the typically dull Protestant tendency to take things so literally. The Protestant mind (especially, it pains me to say, the mind of many Reformed Christians, who bear the added burden of being super suspicious of anything that came before the Reformation) is obsessed with salvation, making the primary goal of the life of a Christian making sure one’s own is secure, and adding that “blessing” to the lives of others. Thus the common (and uncommonly stupid) accusation that people who participate in Lent do so because they hope to curry some sort of favor with God, perhaps even to the point of adding to or securing their salvation. If this is what you think Lent is about, just nope. Nope nope nope.
There’s a view of Lent that does a little better, but still falls short. This view says that Lent helps the Christian eliminate distractions and focus more fully on spiritual things. There’s definitely a grain of truth in this idea. I try every year to give up not only something food related but also something time related. I’m pretty sure that staying off Twitter for 40 days will help immensely with my levels of distraction, and theoretically make it easier for me to focus on spiritual practices (whether I do so is a highly personal matter that I couldn’t possibly give you an update on, especially if things aren’t going so well). But even this distraction theory fails to do real justice to what we attempt in Lent.
To understand Lent, you first and foremost have to understand the Church Calendar, a highly neglected thing in most Protestant circles. Sure, you take a break to say a few things about the baby Jesus at Christmas, and you have a SONrise service on Easter morning (though one of the more stubborn churches I attended at one point in my past refused to brake even for that, sticking to the verse by verse expository preaching that was definitely a better idea than, you know, celebrating the Resurrection). Most Protestants stop there, however, and fail to fully inhabit the astounding, beautiful rhythm of the church year, which follows the life of Christ in miniature each year. Starting with Advent – that cold bitter time where we wait, anxious and in need of a Savior – we experience Christ’s life as if it were happening in front of us. Christmas (it’s twelve days, fools); Epiphany; Lent; Holy Week, culminating in Easter; and then the period of celebration leading up to the ascension. It’s a measured, holy way of tracing Christ’s life and experiences.
Here’s the thing: we need the liturgical calendar because we are so quick to lose ourselves in the time tables of the world. Rush from A to B, quest ever forward in search of “progress”; these tendencies prevent us from meditating deeply on the truths of Christianity. The calendar, then, pulls us back, reminding us constantly that our life-shapes do not conform to those of the world, but instead to Christ. That’s the key of Lent: we experience in our own lives the preparation time of Christ’s life, as he made the slow reluctant march to the cross. We resonate with his time in the desert, where even food and water eluded him. We in some sense enter into the frustrations and triumphs of his ministry. And, most important of all, we participate in the sufferings he experienced on his way to crucifixion.
In some sense that seems to trivialize those sufferings. Oh right, me skipping out on Snickers is a great approximation of Jesus’ torments.Yet dig beyond that initial hesitation and the truth emerges. By denying ourselves of good, life affirming things like food or beer, we expand our imaginations just a little. The distressed pang I feel as I pass on a piece of chocolate cake is some poor, faint marker to my mind. If I train my imagination to see not the sign, but the thing signified, I expand it to the point where Christ’s sufferings become that much more real to me. Lent is, in fact, sensitivity training. Are you sensitive enough to detect the rustling of God’s will as it drifts quietly through the trees? Can you find the buried gold of the human soul beneath the muck and grime that encoats it in your neighbor? Do you have enough empathy to shoot back through the centuries to that fateful day in Palestine and, in some imperfect sense, share in Christ’s sufferings?
I don’t know about you, but I’d much rather live in a world where Christians were distinguishing themselves for their empathetic imaginations than any useless squawking they may do; one where Christians seek to follow their savior-servant to the Golgotha of self denial. I’m nowhere near that point, but by the skips and tiny jumps of practices like Lent, I feel I am being transformed inch by inch, year by year.
Now do yourself a favor and start to expand your imagination a bit by reading T.S. Eliot’s hulking poem Ash Wednesday. Not saying it will make you a better person, but it couldn’t hurt.
