Dear all,
Yesterday, Freda Marie+, David+, and Cristina+ invited us to join in an observance of a Holy Lent. We began our journey through the season with the imposition of ashes, a gritty, earthy reminder of our mortality. A reminder that we are all made of the same stuff and that we will all become the same stuff.
During chapel at PDS, we also talked about the beginning of Lent. Lent, we discovered, is the season of the color purple – a royal color, a serious color. Something serious is going to happen to Jesus, the king. Something serious, something sad – but also something mysterious and full of joy. All during Lent we prepare for the mystery of Easter, and our preparations draw us closer to God. After we offered our birthday blessings, anyone who wished was able to receive ashes on their foreheads, receiving that same gritty, earthy reminder.
Perhaps this Lent feels extra serious to you. Perhaps you continue to feel like we have been in a very long Lent, a Lent that has lasted for the last two years. I wonder – what will it be that draws you closer to God this season?
A previous parish I belonged to was very enthusiastic about one particular practice – Lent Madness (they did other stuff, like pray, too, I promise!). Lent Madness – much like March Madness, of NCAA basketball fame – is a bracketed competition in which a selection of the saints, members of that great cloud of witnesses, are pitted against each other for rounds of fierce voting and debate. It is delightfully silly.
The Rev’s Tim and Scott, the priests who organize Lent Madness, wrote in an email today that it might seem like an incongruous year to engage in an exercise that appears so trivial, so not-serious. “Headlines are filled with news of a powerful nation seeking to use might to exert its will over an unwilling people,” they wrote. “Here in the USA, people of all political persuasions can at least agree that our political system is broken. Social, racial, and economic divisions run rampant. Is there room for a silly approach to Lent?”
But the email from Tim+ and Scott+ reminded me that there is a deeper truth buried in Lent Madness. Recalling the sometimes very messy lives of the saints “reminds us that God does extraordinary things in the lives of ordinary people. People of all sorts and conditions can be bearers of Christ’s light in the world if they but open themselves up to God’s transforming grace…If Christ’s light can burn brightly in their hearts, might there be room for Jesus Christ to shine from our lives?” We are all made out of the same ashes, the same dust.
During Lent, our serious, purple season, we journey with Christ on the path towards Jerusalem – the path to Christ’s Passion, death, and resurrection. Each of us will take this journey in our own way, drawing closer to God in our own ways. And yet we do not make this journey alone. We travel together, as a community of faith, and with all the Christians who have come before us, making this journey in their own way and time. However you make the trip, whether it’s learning something new and cheering along your favorite saints in Lent Madness or not, I pray that you find yourself drawn even closer in to the embrace of God, reminded that we are made from the same stuff and called to shine for the same light.
Love,
Rebecca+