Lent Reflections #1

The heart of Lent for me can be summed up with three verses from the Granddaddy of the penitential Psalms (51):
Create in me a clean heart, O God.
Restore a steadfast spirit within me.

Cast me not from your presence
Take not your Holy Spirit from me.

Renew the joy of your salvation within me.
Uphold me with a willing spirit.

Giving up something for Lent is not mere sacrifice but movement toward Jesus; it’s a response to Jesus’ invitation (as is all of the Christian life): “Come to me, all of you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy and my burden light,” Matthew 11:28-30.

But before we can take on Jesus’s burdens and yoke we have to rid ourselves of the ones we already have. Think of Christians as pilgrims on a journey, and each one takes out two-pound's worth out of his or her sack and leaves it on the side of road so she can travel just that more easily. It’s not a lot of weight, but it makes a difference psychologically. She starts to hike at a faster pace—and realizes she never really needed the thing.

What I gave up (some foods and FaceBook) serve as distractions in my life, and weigh me down. They take up too much mental real estate—and in case of the food, money. They’re things I’m aware I needed to monitor but hadn’t bothered to do.

The clean food also works for a metaphor for other parts of my life: how often I prefer junk food to healthy food, which is ultimately a habit. As I ate a fruit salad this week, I realized it tasted far better than ice cream and wouldn’t feel any guilt because the food served a purpose beyond tasting good. I need to spend my time on fruit salad vs. ice cream: people versus stuff, eternal versus transient. I think the yoke Jesus refers to is obedience and the burden is love for others. The journey towards Jesus is reclaiming our hearts for good and true things (a.k.a. a clean heart):
“Teach us to care and not to care
Teach us to sit still
Even among these rocks
Our peace in His will.”
-T.S. Eliot in “Ash Wednesday”

My mother and I always go to the Benedictine Monastery’s Ash Wednesday service. It’s a deep, heavy service… in the best possible way. The abbot’s homily was far too much for one sitting. The thought from it that has taken root is: most often we pray for God to change people and situations, we rarely pray for God to change us. Lent is a time to acknowledge our deep need for Jesus and our desperate need to be changed.

“Christ is the way out, and the way in: the way from slavery, conscious or unconscious, into liberty; the way from the unhomeliness of things to the home we desire but do not know….” -George McDonald

(Most of the quotations come from Even Among These Rocks by Steven Purcell. It is the absolute best devotion on Lent.)