Discovering Lent

“I’m giving up chocolate for Lent.”
I think that might be one of the most cliche things we think of (and have probably heard… or have even said ourselves) when it comes to the season of lent. 

The sacrifice of delight in chocolate is this idea of giving up something you love for 40-days, and then on Easter Sunday, when chocolate is plentiful in the shapes of bunnies and eggs, we get to enjoy those first bites of this delicious treat we gave up. It tastes sweeter, we savour it a little more, and in the post-Easter days, we most likely return to our previous chocolate eating habits.

I like to think of this idea described above as the ‘starter version’ of lent.

Lent, version 1.0.

It’s saying ‘what’s something I love that is an extra treat in my life that I can give up for 40 days?’.
It’s not necessarily easy (because we love chocolate in all forms–especially hot chocolate when it’s cold outside), and temptation will come (because ‘tis the season for mini eggs), but it’s very doable without much change to the average lifestyle… and that chocolate is easily replaceable with another sweet indulgence that is conveniently, not ‘off-limits’. When you get to enjoy that treat again, there’s a moment of ‘wow, I did it!’, but often your heart and life isn’t stirred to change… or even thought towards Jesus… the one who we are intended to focus on during this season.

If this is enough to pique our curiosity, or if we start here and begin to feel the pull that there must be ‘something more’ with this season, and if we follow those stirrings to consider what  else this rich season could really be about, we begin to explore Lent, version 2.0…

〰️ What IS lent?
〰️ What does it mean to participate in lent?
〰️ Is it just for certain denominations or is lent for everyone?
〰️ Why is lent often so somber?
〰️ What about seeing ash on peoples foreheads?

Each question that stirs is an invitation to explore the season more, inviting us into lent v.3.0, 4.0, 5.0, and beyond as we continue our exploration…

✨Pause✨ Juuuuust to clarify: no ‘version’ of lent is better than the other. If you’d say you’ve taken part in lent intentionally for 5 years, and the first time was in a church and you got ash on your forehead on ash Wednesday and ate pancakes the day before, that is YOUR lent version 1.0. Our first introduction to lent is our own personal version of lent version 1.0. It’s a personal way to engage and evaluate our deepening experience of lent and not comparative to other folks. As faith is a journey of deeper not further, we find ourselves with God on a journey where each time we learn more, we are deepening that relationship, not comparing to anyone else).

What I find most beautiful about faith is the invitation to continual exploration.

As someone who has participated in Advent for more years than lent, I am continually blessed by the season year after year. What is happening in my life, what I’ve been learning and experiencing with the Divine, where I find myself physically during the season, and how I’m engaging with others during it, all impact how I experience the season. It never gets old. It’s continually fresh with wonder, curiosities, and new contemplative practices and spiritual disciplines to stir a new response year after year.

Lent can be this same way.

While I’ve slowly learned about lent, especially when beginning to attend a liturgical church, it’s only recently that I’ve been an active, intentional participant in the season. Last year, I felt the Spirit invite me into expression for lent where I wrote poetry each day of the 40-days by way of ‘Healing Through Words’ which felt like a bold, lenten invitation, to face the darkness and embrace healing, but it also was the practice that aided in an outlet when being with my dad during his last weeks of life, present as he passed, and there as the funeral was planned, as I spoke (read, sobbed with some words in-between) that day, and the grief in the weeks that followed. The lenten practice of poetry writing changed me. Jesus met me on the pages of my journal, in the words typed with frantic thumbs on the ‘notes’ in my phone, and in the poetic moments of my dad’s passing on Good Friday. 

Giving something up? Taking something on? Being with Jesus? 40-days? How is it all connected in the season of lent?

"Each year, around the latter part of winter, Lent arrives. It nearly always surprises me. Here it is, once again, summoning me to change how I typically live." — W. David O. Taylor

Your ‘lent in a nutshell’ is this:

〰️ Lent is a 40-day journey leading to Easter, centred on humility, fasting, simplicity, almsgiving, and lament. 

〰️ Starting with Ash Wednesday (a solemn reminder of human mortality and a call to return to God [learn more about that here], Lent spans 40+ days, including Holy Week which includes Palm Sunday and Holy Thursday (commemorating the last supper), and the Passion of Christ (Good Friday, Holy Saturday, and Easter Sunday).

〰️ In the fourth chapter of Matthew, Jesus spends 40 days in the desert, fasting, praying, and preparing for his mission. Lent is your opportunity for the same; to explore both the life-giving and soul-sucking habits in your life, to perhaps ‘give up’ something that you would categorize as soul-sucking that keeps you unaware of God and replace it with something life-giving to honour and connect with Jesus, and discover the abundant life that Jesus invites us to at Easter. During lent, we focus on what matters most and leave behind what matters least.

To me, the beauty of lent comes in many forms:

✨ As I recall the truth that we are truly made of stardust, that the elements that flow through our veins were once supernovas in the sky, and we will return to these elements in our physical passing and resting, Ash Wednesday feels like not just a somber call to remember that ‘from dust we came and to dust we will return’, but to the beautiful interconnectedness of all that God has made. 

To quote an all-time favourite book: “To some people, stars may seem distant, remote, and even irrelevant. But the fact is they are vital to life. No stars, no supernova death explosions. No supernovas distributing stellar elements throughout the cosmos, no life. The iron in our blood, the calcium in our bones and in the oxygen we breathe are the physical remains— ashes, if you will— of stars that lived and died long ago. Millennia ago, the author of Genesis wrote, ‘the Lord God formed a man from the dust of the ground’... Carl Sagan provided scientific support: ‘we are made of Star stuff’” - Star Struck by Dr.David Bradstreet

✨ As we look deeper at the words that mean repentance, we see that what is often marked by shame and this idea that ‘we humans are horrible and need to be someone completely different to please God’ is actually different. Two words in the Bible translated as repent are the Hebrew t’shuvah which means return, and the Greek metanoia, which means to change ones mind/heart/inner being. As I’ve learned, T’shuvah is the act of ‘returning to our souls’. It is a coming home to our own aliveness. Metanoi is a declaration of agency. It says that we can grow, shift, make something new. 

Here is an invitation of our 40-days in the wilderness of lent in the words of a poet:
‘May you return to your soul.
May you seek out and find
whatever it is that
makes you most alive.’

During a season of repentance during our wilderness time, we acknowledge the times we lived in ways that dull our aliveness and have turned away from our connection to God and all of God’s creation, and we return to who God made us to be. It’s a call to be reminded of God’s great love for us, desire for us to recognize God’s Loving Presence as with us, and invites us to remembrance of this as we seek what makes our soul come alive. Perhaps, we give up something that continually pulls us away from God, that causes us to turn away, and we spend our time intentionally returning to our awareness of God’s Loving Presence with us moment by moment. 

✨ During Holy Week, the invitation to be WITH Jesus as we read the pages of scripture invites us to consider our closeness to Christ. A grace we are encouraged to ask for during the Spiritual Exercises of St.Ignatius during this time is “to simply be a friend to Jesus in the darkest and most difficult time of His life.” or “Sorrow with Christ in sorrow; a broken spirit with Christ so broken; tears; and interior sufferings because of the great suffering which Christ endured.” After cultivating a closeness and intimacy and desire to follow and be with Jesus during our lenten period, being a friend to Jesus— present with Him through it all— makes the all too familiar words on the page come alive in profoundly relational ways. 

✨ And as we celebrate Easter, we can celebrate the spring-time renewal of Jesus. Whether we find ourselves firm in our beliefs or exploring atonement theology, curious about what it means to be saved, diving into the theories on hell, or set-in-stone in our beliefs of it all, Easter Sunday holds something for us.

A portion of a poem reads:
I want to be
saved—

Saved into the wonder,
Into the gorgeous flesh of this world;
Saved so I can forever turn my soul
towards the beauty of which it is a part.

I want to be saved from a narrow mind
And a hardened heart,
Saved so I can grow
Into kindness
And generosity
And selflessness
And creativity.
- Gideon Heugh

Easter Sunday saves us to truly live; connected with God, always. To lean into awareness of this to save us from a life of distraction and scarcity, of thinking we are better than others, of a selfishness that exposes our oft hidden tendencies, and invites us to truly live present to Jesus.

The season of lent, for all the discomfort and wilderness, can be the place of deep transformation.

As seeds are planted and roots form in darkness, so we, too, can be formed during the season of lent, rising anew in the spring, bursting forth to declare this new life, turning our faces towards the Son as plants turn towards the Sun, and we can find the journey well worth it.

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If you’d like to take time to discover lent, Kimee of Sacred Rhythms Yoga and I are hosting a full-day retreat where we introduce you to the main themes and days during the lenten season through yoga and contemplative practices (and, of course, a pancake brunch–shout out Pancake/Shrove Tuesday), so that you can enter into the Lenten season when it arrives with intentional and a deeper awareness…whatever ‘version’ of lent you find yourself in on your faith journey.

This full-day retreat, called Discovering Lent, is happening in Nashville on Saturday, February 22nd. Registration is open now and is limited, so register soon! Click HERE to learn more!