The Lenten season is my favorite time of year, and since it’s a time of fasting from the gluttonous ways of life and feasting on the goodness of God, that should say something about the way I spend the other 320ish days of the year. I spend my entire year waiting for a reason to be radical about things, waiting for a reason to have tunnel vision on Jesus alone.
One of my favorite books is called The Liturgical Year, by Sister Joan Chittister. I want to share with you many of her words from the chapter called Ash Wednesday and The Voices of Lent, because she says things more beautifully than I could.
Every year, Ash Wednesday calls us back to the paths from which we have strayed, refocuses our attention on both the way and the goal of our journey through life.
This year, God has been teaching me about holiness and what that looks like in my life. I’ve come to the conclusion that holiness is not about where you’re not going, but about where you ARE going. The idea isn’t to give up one vice to replace it with another, to reject one path and detour to an equally destructive one. The power in abstinence isn’t what you don’t do – it’s what you do instead.
Ash Wednesday confronts us with what we have become and prods us to do better. Indeed, Lent, we learn on Ash Wednesday, is not about abnegation, about denying ourselves for the sake of denying ourselves. It is about much more than that. It is about opening our hearts one more time to the Word of God in the hope that, this time, hearing it anew, we might allow ourselves to become new as a result of it. It is the call to prayer, to liturgy…
Yesterday I read Lisa’s blog called The New Lent and I got butterflies because that’s it. When you are trying to forget someone or move on from something, you stay busy. You dread empty moments of nothingness, because that’s when you’re at the most danger to think about it or be tempted to rebuild the bridges you’ve burned. Eventually you have been so diligent about the doing that you’ve allowed those weak, troubled areas the space and time they needed to heal.
That is Lent. We have burned bridges, and we must dread being idle in spirit or in body.
In the past, I have given things up. Once, I gave up any sized coffee but a tall. I’ve given up Facebook a few times. But I rarely move towards something. I mostly sit on a rock for 40 days and then get up and keep walking on the same path I was on. It just gives me a break, but it doesn’t create any real change. So often, I miss it.
So this year, I am not giving up certain things. Like Lisa, I am instead choosing to focus on what I am walking towards instead of wandering away from something. I’m going to finish memorizing the book of Philippians so that I, like Christ, may have the Word of God carved on the walls of my heart.
We don’t have enough time to waste time on nothingness. We need to repent our dillydallying on the road to God. We need to regret the time we’ve spent playing with dangerous distractions and empty diversions along the way. We need to repent of our senseless excesses and our excursions into sin, our breaches of justice, our failures of honesty, our estrangement from God, our savorings of excess, our absorbing self-gratifications, one infantile addiction, one creature craving another. We need to get back in touch with our souls.