decades our church has led this retreat, attended by a mix of old friends, newcomers from other churches, men and women willing to dig deeper into the reality of God's love.
Part of my contribution the past two years was to do a talk that focused on setting down things that get in the way of that love. I start with an old, heavy backpack, symbolic of weight I carry from my formative years: a heavy rock of abandonment, bright glass shards of broken relationships, tattered boxing glove, dusty cassette tapes, a long black fabric to drape around myself.
Whatever we start with, whatever we carry, we have work to do to set it down. We're not alone in that work, but it doesn't happen overnight, and doesn't happen at all without our willingness to see, name, set things down.
That's what Lent is for me: a time to look again into that backpack of old baggage. A time to see what I'm ready to address, what I want to be finally freed from. Sometimes the first step is to be still enough to listen.
In a way, we've all been living through a year of Lent. We all let go of control as schedules changed abruptly and events we worked toward were canceled. We were stripped of pastimes and habits as venues closed and even simple shopping trips became less safe. Many of us have spent more time alone than at any times in our lives, while others have had no time alone at all, in close quarters with children, needy and demanding, all day, every day.
The pandemic has simplified things: less meals out, less travel, less gatherings, less choice.
It's been such a hard, strange time I almost chose to forego any Lenten disciplines this year. I normally give up sugar, to remind myself how susceptible I am to slipping into self-medicating with sweets and food.
But Lent isn't really about the sugar, or whatever else we choose to set aside.
It's about the habits of the heart, the inner landscape. The patterns of thought that shape our days.
Hard as the year has been externally, it's been even more challenging internally. We've all struggled with anger, bitterness, doubt, discouragement. We've all wrestled with inner narratives and inner dialogues that take us to places we'd rather not go. Sometimes it feels like the silence is deafening. Sometimes it feels like there's no silence at all: just lots of inner voices: instructing, cajoling, accusing, lamenting.
This week we've had much more snow than usual at the same time that my husband has been battling a case of tendonitis. I've been doing more shoveling than I've ever done. I go out for a half-hour at a time, clear a stretch of driveway or walk, then come back inside for a meeting or call or the next set of emails I need to answer.
I've been doing lots of taking off and putting on: boots, gloves, hat, scarf, coat. Rattling around in my head as I've done this are the words of scripture about putting down and taking off:
Put away from you all bitterness and wrath and anger and wrangling and slander, together with all malice. Ephesians 4:31
Rid yourselves of all malice and all deceit, hypocrisy, envy, and slander of every kind. 1 Peter 2:1
Rid yourselves of all such things as these: anger, rage, malice, slander, and filthy language from your lips. Do not lie to each other. Colossians 3:8-9.
Like the snow that drifts and tumbles no matter how hard I try at neatly shoveled edges,
emotions and behaviors don't stay put. There they are again, accumulating in unexpected corners, swirling into motion after a tense conversation or a glimpse of a disappointing headline.
We can try to empty our backpacks of baggage, but there's always more there. We can try to address the bitterness and malice, but like February snow, there it is again.
Most merciful God, we confess that we have sinned against you in thought, word, and deed, by what we have done, and by what we have left undone.
We have not loved you with our whole heart; we have not loved our neighbors as ourselves.
We are truly sorry and we humbly repent.
I AM giving up sugar again this Lent, although I'm debating the idea of Sundays as "little Easters," with slightly relaxed rules from sundown on Saturday to sundown on Sunday.
And I AM asking God to show me what I need to take off, set down, get rid of, whether habits of the heart or patterns from the past.
But mostly I find, as I enter this cold pandemic Lent, I am praying to hold my heart open, to listen, to wait, to step even further into this place we've all been called: a new openness to an unexpected, unfamiliar future, a new awareness that the way we've understood the world must be radically rearranged. A willingness to set down even those things that seem good to be open to what God has in store.
In grad school I studied TS Eliot's Four Quartets. I wasn't aware then that he and his wife had survived a bad case of the 2018 flu. He had seen the impact of World War 1, converted to Christianity a few years later, began the series of poems in 1935, then wrote the final sections during World War 2. There are parts of the poem that make clear the tension between faith and reality, the challenge of holding harsh experience in the light of promised grace.
This section from East Coker is my starting place this Lent:
I said to my soul, be still, and let the dark come upon you
I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope
Which shall be the darkness of God. As, in a theatre,
The lights are extinguished, for the scene to be changed
With a hollow rumble of wings, with a movement of darkness on darkness,
And we know that the hills and the trees, the distant panorama
And the bold imposing facade are all being rolled away—
For hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love,
For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith
But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting.
Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought:So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing.
