Lent, rants, and solitude

I've spent a lot more time thinking about what Lent is not, rather than what Lent is.

The way we "do" Lent as North American Christians, especially privileged North American Christians who understand our lives as being filled with choices, ends up being very individualistic. We trade thoughts on "what am I doing for Lent?" Frankly I think this tends to water down Lent for us. Lent becomes my exercise and connection with what everyone else is doing is nebulous. I have frankly envious of Islam in this regard: Ramadan is something they do together, as a community, with clear demands upon each believer mitigated only for the very young, the sick, and the elderly. Perhaps there are First World Muslims who chat on some level about "what I am doing for Ramadan", but I myself have never heard a word of such conversations breathed. The community engaging in Ramadan is reinforced by evening gatherings after sundown to share food and common identity, the "iftar". In the late 1970's, in the international student dorms at Stony Brook University, I remember the Iranian guys gathering in small groups, sometimes only two or three, and cooking food together in the student lounge at the end of the hallway. It looked comforting amidst the disjointed fragmented nature of life in the dorms.

In my parish days I longed for something similar, a communally expressed Lent. Some echo of this occurs when a congregation adds a weekday evening "soup supper" and devotion or study group, a nod to the notion that we are all in this together. But God help us, here we are, individualistic and entitled (for the most part) developed world Christians, we are who we are, it is what it is, and the question remains--what are we to do for Lent? What am I doing?

I find that, even after all these years, I am still a recovering Roman Catholic and at no time is this made more clear than during Lent. In the Irish East Coast Roman Catholicism that was my initial formation back in the mythical land called the mid-20th Century, the message was heard loud and clear, conveyed in both words and attitudes by church publications as well as my mom's attitudes, that if you're not suffering somewhat in Lent then you're clearly not with the program. "What are you going up?" peppered conversation before and even, for the procrastinator, shortly after Ash Wednesday. And you weren't supposed to cheat by giving up canned beets or spinach or the opera--it had to hurt. Twinkies, baby, or Snickers bars at the very least.

If one was unwise, one mentioned this to one's mother, who would kindly offer you the precious gift of shame if your hand reached out to the forbidden rack at the check-out line: "It's Lent, what are you doing?" Then would follow what, for my mother, the phrase that I now know helped her make meaning of suffering self-inflicted or visited on her by her exhausting life: "Offer it up."

"Offer it up." Oh great. All this stuff must be making God happy on some petty and nasty-spirited level. Springtime on Long Island consisted of long months of school with summer only a distant hope, chilly sunlight, and the creeping fear that I was not, on a growing daily basis, putting enough numbers up on the heavenly suffering scoreboard.

So, a confession: Lenten renunciations have never worked well for me. Hey, props to you if they do, for whatever they mean for you. Nor do I regard my personal Lenten baggage as, at age 57, a problem that someone can do me the favor of fixing. When I try to adopt some self-imposed measure of fasting, the end result is that it makes me secretly anxious and self-absorbed, and I am of the firm belief that this does no one any good, least of all myself. So other than gently trying to be in some solidarity with my fellow privileged Christians on days such as Ash Wednesday and Good Friday, I leave the imposed renunciation thing alone for the most part. So if you're looking for someone with whom to have a Lenten beer, I'm your man.

As such I can fortunately bypass Western Christianity's distortion of Lent, which is to make of it a self-improvement project. I'm thinking like "I'll lose 15 pounds for Lent this year", or "I'll give up junk food." One firm conviction I do hold is that Lent is NOT a Christian self-improvement project, a pious Springtime version of New Year's resolutions. Rare is the New Year's resolution that lasts until March, and if we run Lent through the same self-centered sieve I don't think we'll much like the crud left behind. Lose weight, eat healthier, exercise, fine--all great, worthy, but just do this on one's own time and don't enlist Jesus or the church year as one's support group.

Again back in parish days, God always planned a more demanding and authentic Lent than I could ever choose. Lent is when people got sick and died. Lent is when we inhabited the dark and horrifying story of betrayal and torture and execution and cowardice that is what we read in the Gospel during Holy Week. As such, all of us, especially the more wounded and more fragile, got even more fragile and anxious and on edge. Fights and divisions happened. Someone always had a meltdown near or during Holy Week. No accident that clergy resignations nationwide spike up right after Easter. "That's all I can stands, I can't stands no more!"

Amidst this, I came to appreciate how Benedict in his Rule phrases it--that "the life of the monk should be a perpetual Lent", but that maybe to tip one's hat to the season, doing something extra small thing may be called for. We all are about the business of following Jesus in whatever confused and foggy fashion we can manage. But yes, maybe something extra. Benedict goes on to say that none of the monks should do anything extra without the abbot's knowledge and permission. I think this is because there are abundant opportunities for pride, self-absorption, and even self-destructive behavior subtle or overt in personally adopting disciplines. In these cases, better to not do anything extra, and just walk around with the humility of knowing that your life is nothing special.

This latter is more like my Lent. I know I am a pretty tepid fellow on most days, and deeply self-absorbed. I do better to stay put and centered in my own life as it is, in its devastating ordinariness, aware of my limitations and, increasingly with the years and with the work in critical care that I do, aware of my mortality.

I think on this especially when I draw the 6 AM shift at the hospital. I like padding down the empty hallway that will soon be filled with bustling staff and patient's families, bearing about their array of emotions ranging from hope to deepest grief. There is something sweet and even innocent about the hospital as it awakened and yawns, stretches. If there are not an overwhelming number of pre-surgeries, I make stopping in the chapel an early item on my list. A man from the neighborhood is often there, praying in solitude. I stand in the back so as not to disturb him, quietly adopt a modified Tai Chi stance so none of my joints are locked and energy can flow. I ask God to allow the divine energy to follow through me to those whom I meet, and in turn I ask that all the pain and sadness and anger and disappointment and regret and fear and despair I will encounter today flow through me and not remain, instead flow into the endless depths of the well of Christ's compassion. I have long learned that if it remains in me, it will son destroy me.

Minute by minute the hallways fill with those arriving to work, arriving for care, arriving to visit. I walk among them all, just another human being, greeting friends, trying to be hospitable to those especially who come wearing bewilderment or fear on their faces. I am, strangely enough, alone, inhabiting myself who am so in need of the minute by minute mercy of God, and who has slowly learned through the years that this mercy may be trusted. But none of this is resolved, none of this is a done deal, none corresponds to some sort of finished self-project that is complete and ready for public consumption.

After the rant about all my objections to Lent, a confession--I have added a small thing, reading the daily quote from "A Year With Thomas Merton." Today the reflection from his journals is about this sort of solitude: "...the solitary knows least where he (sic) is going, and yet he is more sure, for there is one thing he cannot doubt: he travels where God is leading him. That is precisely why he doesn't know the way."