reframing Lent

I thought about giving something up for Lent this year, but I found I couldn’t do it. Putting my Christmas tree away was difficult enough. Lent got here before I’d gotten used to the darkness again, and I just wasn’t ready to embrace the season in the same ways I have in the past.

I’m honestly not sure if my reticence toward Lent has subconsciously played into the change in my patterns or not – but in truth, these past weeks have been busier than I would have liked, and you can only burn a candle at both ends for so long until it just doesn’t work, and so sometimes during this Lenten season, I have slept late, listened to sermons and podcasts on long walks, and prioritized rest and reflection instead of going to church and mid-week services – and the ability to do this has been such a gift. I sometimes miss being “in ministry” – but I do not miss being tied to Sunday mornings.

Shortly after Lent began, I had the privilege of participating in a conversation Jonathan Merritt led on Lenten praxis. It was a really fascinating conversation, and one of the ideas that was raised that evening has stuck with me; it’s reframing the way I think about Lent.

Frederick Buechner writes: “After being baptized by John in the river Jordan, Jesus went off alone into the wilderness, where he spent forty days asking himself the question what it meant to be Jesus. During Lent, Christians are supposed to ask one way or another what it means to be themselves.”

This was a surprisingly new concept to me. I’ve read this narrative so many times, and I knew that the points of temptation Jesus faced were related to his identity, but I don’t think I ever really thought about the fact that he was in the desert for forty days working out his identity before it was questioned. Nor had I considered the possibility that giving something up for Lent isn’t the only way to identify with Christ in the desert.

Buechner’s perspective is worth a read; you can find the excerpt here. He poses some really good questions.

And so I’ve been asking myself: who am I?

It’s been an interesting exercise. I’ve identified a few things about my life that I would really like to change, and started putting plans in place to change them (I’ll likely write more about this another time). I’ve started dreaming about some of the possibilities that will exist when I gain that freedom.

I took an Enneagram assessment (as it turns out, I’m a 4 – the intense creative, or romantic individualist – are we surprised by this? not so much…) – and am learning that some of the ways in which I respond to stress are hard-wired into my personality; they’re not going anywhere, but understanding where these reactions come from is proving helpful.

I’m eating better, and walking more, and making intentional space for reflection – and all because when I started asking the very simple but very complex question – who am I? – I found out that who I am and who I want to be don’t quite mesh. But with some time and attention, they can; I have hope.

As Buechner sums it up: “To hear yourself try to answer questions like these is to begin to hear something not only of who you are, but of both what you are becoming and what you are failing to become. It can be a pretty depressing business all in all, but if sackcloth and ashes are at the start of it, something like Easter may be at the end.”

And Easter is right around the corner.

image credit: pine watt on Unsplash