Lent encourages us to fan the coals of faith
For a string of years, near the beginning of March, Deb (my wife) and I would pack up and go to Whidbey Island near Seattle, Wash. It was a way to shake off winter’s habits — habits of hunching under the heavy coats, burning house lights against inviolable nights, ceding to the numbing comforts of couch and screen, and the lethargy of never feeling properly hungry.
More than this, however, the change of scene broke old patterns of thought through a shift in geography and the sudden arrival of spring.
On Whidbey Island in March, spring was booming. Grass Widows and Tomcat clover coloured the hills around Ebey’s Landing. And on the misty rises above Parego’s Lagoon, Pacific wrens sang in elderberry and evergreen huckleberry.
It’s not like they could stop themselves from singing. And it’s not like I could refuse to listen.
For two weeks, it was almost impossible to take anything for granted. Nothing, it seemed, was lost on me: the oceanview cottage, the Olympics floating above the horizon, the shell and gravel beach, the heavy-scented surf, the lagoon’s alien life, the pairs of bald eagles spiralling, gloriously close, overhead, and, of course, my wife.
We spent the days with our walking sticks close at hand, marking the distance along paths high above Puget Sound; where the long curve of earth draws into view, then draws you in into its arms. By late afternoons, we’d be leg-weary and windblown, sea-sprayed and deliciously hungry.
Slowly, daily distractions lifted. Abstractions lifted. But with it — upsetting and unexpected — came a sort of crisis of conscience, a kind of negative epiphany. Amid all this beauty and natural solitude, the reality of my own death somehow crystallized
All those things that I employed to avoid the fact of my own mortality swung heavily into view: all that well-stowed, self-exonerating, self-referential crap. In short, everything I did to make myself more real.
Somewhere along the vacation’s path, however, this too lifted and I found myself walking in a kind of innocence. Found myself light and in love again, with, well, God.
In the ray of this outward gaze I caught a glimpse of this truth: we don’t really have a self apart from other selves — and more profoundly, apart from God. In this oneness I was invaded by well-being and happiness.
How I wanted to hang on to that reality, that innocence. I arrived back home resolute, and while making the vow (as you inevitably do), to keep it alive — it left. Spring stumbled. The singing grew faint. Spiritual innocence, apparently, does not abide the entombment of self-determination and analysis.
However — and this is a gift — we are left with a few live coals: the knowledge that we still have the capacity for innocence; the memory of dying into life, of living outside of death, as though all of life was dawning before our eyes — if only for a moment.
This, then, is what I know of Lent. Lent is fanning coals in the dark of night. It is faith in the movement toward God through the absence of God. It is keeping alive, in the deep of winter, our extravagant capacity for wonder, born in the flare of spiritual innocence; which itself is a restless and reckless purity of heart that has nothing to do with sinless piety.
St. Benedict says that all of life should be considered as Lent. To be fully conscious of our ashes to ashes, our contingency, the suffering of our essential mutability, is to be in the spirit of Lent.
Lent finally is the acceptance of the winter inherent in joy, which makes it possible to be ready, at any moment, for the Easter dance.