“The Ash Wednesday Mormon”

I strongly concur with this piece by Jana Riess, to which I should have posted a link yesterday:

http://janariess.religionnews.com/2015/02/18/ash-wednesday-mormon/

And I, too, was happy to see this:

http://ldsliving.com/story/78067-6-ways-mormons-can-enjoy-the-spirit-of-lent

I don’t think that you have to put ash on your forehead or observe Lent, though I have no problem with either.  Nor do I think we need crucifixes (whether empty and plain or with a gory Jesus hanging on them) in our churches — though I have no problem at all with the cross as a symbol of Christianity, and, in fact, rather like it.  (I’ve occasionally thought of wearing one, but the fact is that I don’t wear jewelry at all.  I don’t even like wedding rings.  Or any other rings.  Not for ideological reasons.  They simply don’t appeal to me.)

But I’ve lamented for years now the fact that we do little religiously or spiritually to lead up to Christmas — hence my ineffectual though labor-intensive efforts on this blog to mark off the days of Advent two years in a row (I won’t bother doing it this year; too much work, too little interest) — and that we do essentially nothing to prepare for Easter.  (Heck, sometimes Easter itself gets little notice, even in our sacrament services, which I find theologically incomprehensible.  I’ve sat through Easter Sunday services that were given over to talks on goal-setting and on missionary work.)  There are great Easter hymns, for example, but, in the wards to which I’ve belonged, we’ve usually sung them only on Easter Sunday, which means we only sing maybe two of them.  We should be singing them during the weeks before Easter, as well.

I’ve wondered why this is so.  Perhaps it’s because almost all of our early converts (and our early leaders, who were, necessarily, converts) came from backgrounds in a particular kind of very low-church Protestantism that paid little or no attention to the traditional Christian liturgical year.  Perhaps it’s because — and this would be to our shame, but I think it’s true — we take our clues on these matters from the hyper-commercialized “Christmas” traditions around us, which have largely replaced Advent with “Only __ shopping days left till Xmas!” and from the fact that Easter, thus far, hasn’t been successfully commercialized to any great degree and, accordingly, tends to pass almost unnoticed in our society and in the media.

In any event, I agree with Jana Riess that our tendency to concentrate only on Easter — and, sometimes, to neglect even that — has left us somewhat impoverished.  I’ve even used that very word.

I think we can do much better, whether by incorporating observance of Ash Wednesday and Lent and Holy Week (e.g., Good Friday) into our lives or by creating some more peculiarly Mormon, perhaps individual or family-based, way of sustained thinking about Atonement and Resurrection in the lead-up to Easter Sunday.