Am I the only one doing Lent all wrong?
Welcome to the newsletter & a Palm Sunday post all wrapped up in one.
I thought starting a newsletter would look polished and purposeful, but instead you get disheveled, late-March, yearning for spring me.
(This tree, stubbornly hanging onto its leaves, feels like it’s mocking me…)
But maybe this is also an apt starting place?
1. A little bit about me
I’m a practical theologian, an ethnographer, and a pastor. I’m also the author of two academic books, one anthropological, one theological, but over the past decade, I’ve been writing on blogs, Facebook, and anywhere that will take me about life’s big questions:
How can we resist productivity and grind culture?
What are the limits and graces of faith?
What can disability teach us about being human?
How can we simultaneously cultivate gratitude, find peace, and pursue justice? (Okay, that one kind of got away from me, but I promised big questions, didn’t I?)
2. What you can expect
I’ll share a short, personal essay at least once every two weeks, sometimes links to what I’m reading and studying, and insights into current research and writing projects.
3. Please comment & share!
I’m moving my posts over to Substack, because I’m hoping to find and create more community around theses questions. I miss the dialogue creating in blogging features, I’ve been inspired by and will frequently recommend to you other writers on Substack, and I truly want to hear what you have to say. So please don't just read, but let me know what resonates, what doesn’t, and how I can provide content that meets your interests and hopes.
4. Without further ado, here is today’s post. Please do let me know if you, too, have trouble with Lent!
Have we “hacked” even Lent to death? I wonder as I hobble toward Palm Sunday, overwhelmed and unnerved. You see, I’ve been trying to adopt a decidedly “unrelentless” (anybody see what I did there?…chuckle) discipline for lent this year, one that becomes less about my actions and more about God’s.
And at first I was so emboldened that it was “working.” At the invitation of a friend of mine I’ve been asking what God wants me to give up each day (or whenever I remember to, let’s be honest) rather than trying to cultivate the same mindless habit. It has been humbling. Because pretty much everything in my life comes down to my desire to control things. So letting go of a little bit of that control I cultch so tightly is very much needed.
Yet, over halfway through lent, why do I get the sinking feeling that I’m still doing it wrong? My daughter, Lucia, started 2024 with a bone infection, then we needed major work done on our basement all of a sudden, and then we all came down with Covid. Post-Covid, Lucia and I both got secondary infections. I’m still weathering mine and hers requires her to come off the one experimental treatment available with promise to halt the progression of her rare disease. And now her body is reeling as we slowly wean this medication. Our house is literally torn apart and buzzing because we’ve got painters stripping every board on it to paint it this spring. And I just found out that Lucia’s wheelchair van needs one tiny part that will cost a thousand dollars to fix the door on the ramp side.
Deep, deep sigh. Everything feels broken in me and in us.
(Writing outdoors with the first daffodils promises of spring.)
And yet, as pastors themselves often quip to one another, “that’ll preach.”
It is perhaps only from the chaos and the ruins that I can see the hubris in delineating where God can take control, one calculated morsel at a time. Rather than put myself on one, I see now that I restricted God to a diet of cordoned access to what I really need. And without believing that God is a God of vengeance, it occurs to me that sometimes there is just no way for God to get through our walls than to tear them down.
Perhaps this is what Lent looks like. That insolent reminder that we do need God in a world that tempts us to restrict him/her/them one discipline at a time. That clarity that spiritual disciplines do not work for us, but for God, and they are not about withholding pain but drawing us closer to God. And that truth that Lent at its core is about loss and heartache and sin and despair.
Do not go gentle into Lent, I think, because before resurrection comes suffering and death. I thought I had found a way to contain it, I suppose. Turns out, God wanted me to remember, that that is precisely God’s job, and not mine.
So here I sit, yet another Lent, yet another human fail for me. And somehow, someway, that one does, finally, sit just right within me.