Ash Wednesday 2014

I’ve always been better at giving things up for Lent than taking things on. I’m much more diligent about not eating chocolate or drinking red wine than I am about taking on resolutions, such as to read and pray more, to stay in touch with friends, or to mindfully admire nature. These things seem like good, worthwhile ideas, but they often get lost along the way in the busyness of life and, come Easter, they remain undone.

This morning at church, our curate preached on finding JOY in Lent. She urged us to go ahead take on our regular disciplines—prayer, fasting, giving up—but not to give up all those small everyday joys that revive and please us.  Her point was that if we only give up, the fatigue and stress often brings out our worst: our impatience with others, our judgmentalness, our crabbiness (me--guilty on all three counts!) —all things that make us very poor witnesses of the love of Christ. 

I’ve been running this around my mind all day now, because, appealing as her message was, I was not at all sure she was correct.  I do think that in the modern Church it can be too easy to forget about the discipline that is part of being a Christian, or, for that matter, being in any serious relationship, whether it’s with God or someone else. I grew up confessing my “manifold sins and wickedness” every Sunday, and it seems that somewhere between then and now the idea of sin itself and the hard work of the Christian life—God’s expectations for us as well as ours for Him, has often fallen by the way, or at least have gotten very watered down. Lent is a good time to remember these things; the way of the Cross is not easy, and it demands a lot of us. Lent, to me, is the time to pause and take account of all these things.

But here at the end of the day, I’m coming around to our morning Ash Wednesday preacher’s way of thinking.  If we are to walk the way that’s set before us, then we need all of our emotional, spiritual, and physical energy to carry us along. If giving things up is second nature this time of the Christian year, then maybe it would be a good discipline to try to practice more joy this Lent—the kind of “taking on” project that has never come as naturally to me.  To expand my idea of what Lent means this year.  But. . . I’m still giving up meat, just in case.