I’m a firm believer that Lent, practiced consciously, is a guardrail against spiritual bypassing. The regular observance of seasons of austerity, lament, and penance, which we Christians get in Lent and Advent, guide us to enter into aspects of the human experience we’d rather not endure.

Other spiritual traditions have similar seasons: Jews have Yom Kippur; Muslims have Ramadan; Hindus have Navaratri; and so forth. These rhythms keep us pain-avoidant human beings honest: they take us into the shadow so that we have an opportunity to alchemize - or if you prefer a Christianese word: redeem - what we find there: the uncomfortable feelings, the limiting beliefs, patterns of harm, the losses we didn’t have time to grieve, traumas we didn’t have resources to heal before. These seasons offer us the opportunity to make meaning of the human condition and to accept it as it is, to accept ourselves as we are.

In Lent we are invited to stop judging our pain and instead feel it and allow it to teach us. It is part of a cycle: we don’t stay in Lent forever. Death comes, and then Resurrection. Weeping comes in the soul’s night, then joy in the morning. We sow in tears, we reap in joy. If we never accept the rhythm of sowing in tears, we have little appreciation, much less gratitude, for joy. We know light by its contrast to darkness.

In Western culture we make very little space for weakness, pain, mourning, lament, sadness. We are taught early on that excessive feeling that doesn’t fall in the category of anger or excitement is unwelcome, and that sadness is a pathology. But the rhythms of the Christian faith tradition offer a different paradigm: one that welcomes the mourner, blesses the weak, and gives space and voice to lament. It assigns value to loneliness and suffering even as it assures us that we are never alone in suffering.

Jesus heading out to the desert wilderness for a period of solitude and austerity sets the precedent for Lenten practice. Jesus accepts all parts of human experience, entering into the full spectrum of emotion. He rejects no parts of the whole.

In week 2 of Lent, Year B,  we are invited along with the disciples to “deny” ourselves, take up the instrument of our suffering, and follow him into the totality of embodied adventure, and to do this willingly, without judgement or resistance, trusting that the way out is the way through.

God, our culture teaches us to avoid pain,
And to suppress emotion;
But in the wisdom tradition that Christ practiced,
We find space for pain, emotion, and much more.

In Lent we go willingly into human pain,
Into embodied experiences of lament,
Of grief,
Of pain,
Of fasting,
Of disorder.

We follow Christ into this full spectrum of emotion and practice,
Into seasons of joy and seasons of lament,
Welcoming all this earth-side life presents,
Understanding the cycles and rhythms of being.

As Christ rebuked Peter, who pressed him to bypass suffering (1),
And instead invited Peter to follow him through -
Through self-denial,
Through painful feelings,
Through uncomfortable work,
Bearing witness to the portion of life that is death.
So we are invited to make meaning of the painful parts of our journey,
To redeem them and be transformed in the process.

This is the work of Lent:
We follow Christ through all this,
Trusting that this path ultimately leads toward joy (2),
That death ultimately brings us to resurrection.

Help us, oh God, to be present to our lives as they are,
And to move through cycles of grief with patience and grace,
Practicing the embodied faith Christ has taught us,
And trusting that morning, and joy, will come (3).

Amen

1. Mark 8:33
2. Romans 4:20, Mark 8:31
3. Psalm 30:5

Photo by Unsplash

Litany posted with permission