IVP - Strangely Dim - Happy Lent?

Happy Lent?

We are now almost two weeks into the season of Lent, and I have to say, for how widely practiced Lent is, retailers don't seem to take advantage of it much. Normally they miss no chance to throw trifling sale items at us for months in advance of holidays such as Halloween or St. Patrick's Day. I noticed on Valentine's Day, for example, that Easter candy was already on sale. I'm not sure I want to ingest any kind of egg--even a chocolate one--that's over a month old. But until March 23 (and even after, when all the leftovers go on the 75 percent off table), we will be bombarded with egg dyes, bunnies, chicks, chocolate, jelly beans, white-chocolate-peanut-butter-filled crosses, pastel-colored baskets and fake grass. All for a one-day holiday. But for Lent--a season that lasts more than a month--all I can see that the retailers have found to capitalize on is fish sandwiches.

The reasons Lent gets overlooked seem obvious: our culture is all about excess, and Lent is about giving up, going without. And our culture is all about being (or at least appearing--and Christians are, I lament, among the most guilty of this) happy and doing what makes us feel good, and Lent is about mourning. Lent is so contrary to our cultural instincts that not even Kleenex has exploited its sales potential, issuing seasonal tissue boxes that say something like "Blessed are those who mourn" or "A sad face is good for the heart" on them. Or maybe they just haven't thought of it yet.

For someone who didn't grow up observing Lent, I'm a pretty big fan of it. During Lent I'm surprisingly willing to try new disciplines that help me see my sin, name my sin and gain a clearer picture of my own heart. During Lent I think more intentionally about what is distracting me from God. I give myself permission to name disappointments, frustrations, burdens I'm tired of carrying, and give them to God. During Lent I remind others who are struggling that they're not alone, that the season of Lent was born out of struggle and grief and serves as a reminder that, though we mourn and grieve and cry at other times of the year, struggle is a natural "season" that we all go through on this earth. It's part of the church calendar because mourning is important, and because Jesus himself felt and carried the weight of our sin and grief and evil and brokenness so completely, and therefore understands it more than we ever can.

As you continue to tell us how you record laughter, if it's not too much of a juxtaposition, I hope you'll tell us how you mourn, too. In some ways, it seems especially fitting to put laughter and mourning together because that is, essentially, how life on this earth inevitably is put together: deep joy, because God chose to offer redemption to a perfect-world-turned-sinful, is joined with deep mourning, because the perfect-world-turned-sinful is so broken and hurting and evil. Life and death. Hope and grief. Laughter and tears. These juxtapositions are what our days are made of.

So I'll start us off, first with the laughter: I think I record my laughter with exclamatory remarks, exclamation points and possibly capital letters. When that's too much work, though, I do revert to the highly inadequate repetition of the word ha.

And then, on its heels, the things I'm mourning in this season, from reflection on my church's solemn assembly two weeks ago and my own processing and the news of the world around me: rampant sex trafficking and slave labor, shootings that recently killed five women in a local clothing store and seven students at Northern Illinois University, the bitterness in my heart from the things I do out of obligation, the struggles of friends having a hard time seeing God right now. And I mourn them by reflecting on them, not distracting myself from them, by praying for others, by sitting with God in silence.

Laughter is good and necessary (and yes, profoundly distracting). But so is mourning. And the combination of the two, I would argue, is profoundly countercultural: mourning to remind those around us that this isn't how things were meant to be, and laughter to reveal the abundant life and profound hope Christ offers us, even in the midst of the darkness. So--happy Lent, friends. May you laugh and mourn well in this season, and meet Christ richly in both.

Posted by Lisa Rieck at February 20, 2008 9:04 AM