I’ve made a big deal over the dozen-plus years of this blog’s existence of why Lent is my least favorite liturgical season. How I washed the ashes off my forehead immediately after leaving my first Ash Wednesday service in my twenties. How Lent often turns into a season of performance art–look how holy I can be for 40 days. But not this year–Lent seems very appropriate this time around.
In a recent episode of her podcast “Everything Happens,” Kate Bowler described Lent as “the season for losers.” If you wonder why things seldom if ever work out in the way they would have worked out if you were in charge, Lent is your season. If you suspect that a life of faith seeking to follow Jesus and the American story of success if you work hard might not be compatible, sink into the reflection and honesty of Lent.
A student told me a couple of weeks ago that she strongly believes in the platitude that “everything happens for a reason” (she didn’t call it a platitude). When asked, I would guess that 75% of any of my classes in any year would agree that this statement is true. Ah, the innocence of 18-22 years olds.
If is, of course, easy after the fact to come up with a revisionist story of how a painful or destructive event actually turned out to be a good thing. There is a certain comfort in believing that we live in a universe in which everything does indeed work out for good. And, of course, everything does have a cause. But the “reason” in the platitude has moral import–it means “reason” as in “makes sense.” And the more years one has under one’s belt, the more one learns that sometimes, shit happens. There is no sense, there is no reason, there is no redmption. Lent is the season that invites us to stop avoiding and start inhabiting, as Kate Bowler says, “A Lent for Real Life.” In her podcast, she says that
For the next 40 days, we walk together on the downslope of God. And yes, Easter is coming. Hope will be realized. The lovely part is going to come true, but we’re not going to skip ahead. This is the season that asks us to stop pretending we’re holding it all together. It is a time to pause, to sit with what’s fragile and unfinished, and let God meet us in the hardest parts of our lives
If you have been finding it more and more difficult to make even a shred of sense of what’s happening around you, go ahead and sink into Lent. Don’t let anyone talk you out of the conviction that things aren’t working out in the way that any reasonable divine being would approve of. Perhaps you will resonate with this song by Katelyn Tarver–let it be your Lenten anthem.
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