Lent for the Unusual

I’ve decided to take up fun for Lent.

In case you’re not familiar with it, Lent is the observance of the 40 days before Christ’s death and resurrection. Christians use the time to engage in self-denial, acts of charity, and spiritual practices. Often this gets translated into “giving something up for Lent”—something you love, like chocolate or (in my daughter’s case this year) television.

I used to do this too: coffee is my besetting sin, so I’d go cold turkey for six weeks. But then I started thinking about it. Because of my particular background and neuroses, I had already spent many years denying myself the things I wanted, Lent or no Lent. How would “giving something up” help?

So I moved on to adding spiritual practices, like praying the psalms or extra scripture reading. That worked for a while. But then, four years ago, I became an associate of Holy Cross Monastery and started doing all those things as part of my Rule of Life. Now what?

In the last couple of years as Lent approached, I’ve simply paid attention to my life and adopted whatever filled a need at the time. That’s what brought me to fun. So far, 2009 has been extraordinarily trying. Earlier this month, I held our dog—our wonderful companion for 15 years—as she passed from this world to the next. Her illness in the month before left me dangerously sleep-deprived. Our parish’s search for a priest has placed me squarely in the crossfire over gays in the Episcopal Church. And it has been many years since I really understood how to have fun.

If my life is to be fully what God intends, I need to cultivate this side of myself.

So for the next six weeks, I’ll take in some movies. I’ll go skiing for a day or two. I’ll drive 300 miles to spend time with some of the funniest people on the planet. I may curtail my intake of news and study groups and even coffee hour at church to clear my head of the strident voices I hear in my daily life.

In the process—by attending to a shortcoming in my character—perhaps I’ll become more closely aligned with the person whom God created me to be. Put another way, I will become more of my best self. Sounds like a good goal for Lent, yes?

If you’re a Christian, what are you doing for Lent this year? If you’re from another faith tradition, do you have a season of the year for self-denial? And how does your practice bring you closer to the Divine? You’re more than welcome to post your own experiences.

We Have Read the Psalms and They Is Us

Ever since my youth, I have been wretched and at the point of death;
I have borne your terrors with a troubled mind.
Your blazing anger has swept over me;
your terrors have destroyed me. (Psalm 88:16-17)

Because you have made the Lord your refuge,
and the Most High your habitation,
no evil shall happen to you,
neither shall any plague come near your dwelling. (Psalm 91:9-10)

The genius who developed the Episcopal lectionary (the daily schedule of scripture readings) put these two psalms together on the same day. Granted, one is to be read at Morning Prayer, the other at Evening Prayer. But because I only pray once a day, I said them both together—and it was gut-wrenching. By the time I got halfway through Psalm 91, I felt that I was lying.

How on earth can both these psalms be true? In one, God has left the psalmist blind, friendless, and in a place where “darkness is my only companion.” In the other, “he shall give his angels charge over you…lest you dash your foot against a stone.”

If we look at these psalms for a moment as unvarnished human responses to God (rather than absolute truth claims about God’s character), we get closer to what I see as the breathtaking beauty of the psalms—and the value of the liturgies that call us to pray them. Name a human emotion, and somewhere, in some verse, the psalmist probably expresses it to God. The 150 psalms, taken together, sweep across the whole range of our experience, unflinchingly expressing our anger and thirst for vengeance as well as our joy and devotion to the Holy One.

When we pray the psalms, then, we see ourselves. When we pray them in a regular order, we come face to face, eventually, with the parts of our humanity we don’t like. More important—and this is the key—we express them all to our Source without reservation.

Is this maybe, just maybe, what a spiritual life should look like?

Imagine it. Life throws everything at us: birth and death, unutterable joy and unspeakable sadness, wild success and crushing failure, validation and rejection. Whether we can say God causes these things or not, we look for God within each experience. In the process, we tell God our feelings about it—even the “bad” feelings—with the implied confidence that God will never reject us utterly…that if God seems absent, it doesn’t mean God is absent…that, indeed, Love itself is always there, leading or carrying us to the other side.

This doesn’t answer the question of why life—God?—throws everything at us. I have my suspicions, and I think we can sometimes glimpse the reasons in specific circumstances if we pay close attention. On a global scale, of course, we have no answer. What we do have, in the psalms, is a model of how to approach God at our best and at our worst: naked, unashamed, and unafraid.

When the Word of the Lord Is Rare

The word of the Lord was rare in those days; visions were not widespread. (1 Samuel 3:1b)

You may have noticed that I haven’t blogged for a month. Silence in these parts has happened before, but this time is different. (Yes, I’m about to blog about not blogging. Ironic, isn’t it?)

During past silences, I had several topics to ponder here, but other commitments demanded my time. This time, though, I’ve simply had nothing to say. It doesn’t mean that nothing is happening: in fact, we’ve endured a major life event or two, and I’ve learned some lessons about myself. But nothing that translates to this space.

That nothingness reminded me of the verse from 1 Samuel. I’ve always felt a twinge of sadness when reading it. How heartrending, I’d think, to be this out of touch with God. I’d wonder what happened to put this distance between the Creator and his creation.

What if it’s not sad, though? What if it’s a natural part of life with God?

The mystics have written volumes about times like this: times when God appears to be absent and no spiritual practice brings comfort. Their “desert,” which I think I’ve experienced on a small scale, can feel desperate and lonely; this past month has been more benign—a simple recognition that nothing is happening. Either way, the great writers of Christian mysticism have described this desert as a pearl of great price in the spiritual journey: it strips us of all our unnecessary layers and brings us face to face with God as nothing else can.

So is there anything to do when “the word of the Lord is rare”? I think there’s real value in maintaining the rhythm of our spiritual lives, day after day after day. If we say Morning Prayer each day, let us continue. If we attend worship every week, let us continue. If we read sacred texts to learn wisdom—even if the words just seem like a jumble—let us continue. A day off here and there for refreshment is not bad. But the steady, soothing rhythm of our spiritual practice serves as an anchor for our souls. Especially when nothing is happening.

Because in truth, whether we know it or not, something is happening. The verse from 1 Samuel introduces one of the greatest outpourings of the Spirit in Israel’s history: the rise of the great prophet Samuel, the reign of David, the wisdom of Solomon. Who knows whether it all would have taken place without a time when “the word of the Lord was rare”?