What Will Lent Mean for Us in 2023?

 

Yet even now, says the LORD, return to me with all your heart, with fasting, with weeping, and with mourning;
 rend your hearts and not your clothing.  

Return to the LORD, your God, for he is gracious and merciful, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love, and relents from punishing.

Joel 2: 12-13 NSVue

It is my Lent to break my Lent,

To eat when I would fast, To know when slender strength is spent, Take shelter from the blast When I would run with wind and rain, To sleep when I would watch. It is my Lent to smile at pain But not ignore its touch.

Madeleine L’Engle

This is Ash Wednesday, the solemn beginning to the 40-day season of Lent in the Christian liturgical calendar. Lots of Protestants observe Ash Wednesday and Lent now, after a fashion, even though they aren't all that sure what to do with this time of preparation for Easter. What are the rules and regs? Are we really supposed to fast in some fashion, give something up? Is it possible to trivialize Lent with arbitrary abstinence, and dietary choices? How do we go deeper in the "practice of the presence of God?".

I appreciate the ambivalence of Madeleine L'Engle's poem, which recognizes the importance of these days and weeks while acknowledging that they aren't readily defined. I've long felt that Lent was important, an opportunity to recalibrate my focus and remember that my faith calendar is different from the one on which I write the appointments and expectations of each day.

We're hoping that we can get to our congregation's Ash Wednesday service this evening and will watch the forecast which is promising a blast of Winter. There will be the familiar readings and the sooty sign of the cross. Through the rest of Lent I want to be aware and open to the presence of Christ in my life and attuned to the world around me as the seasons change. I suppose that is enough of a start for Lent in 2023.