Optimism and opportunity for renewal

This third pandemic Lent, religious leaders see hope in declining coronavirus numbers

As Lent 2022 commences, Christians worldwide mark the season with traditions that include self-sacrifice, penance, fasting and almsgiving — but with a new sense of hope after two dark pandemic years.

Many churches shut their doors, went virtual, or altered services to heed health warnings during the past two Lenten seasons, while in contrast Lent 2022, which began Wednesday, finds worship largely returning to “normal.”

This year, “Lent is not about worshipping from home,” says a cautiously optimistic Father Edmundo Zarate, Catholic pastor of St. Anthony Church in National City and St. Jude Church in San Diego. “We are part of a community, the body of Christ as St. Paul tells the Corinthians, and we now have the opportunity to be witnesses in that faith community — no matter our religious tradition.

“We are wanted and expected to come back and be part of the church.”

‘Becoming a community’

After the first 90 days of the coronavirus pandemic, Skyline Church leaders decided that people’s mental, emotional and spiritual health was being compromised. They felt compelled to fully resume in-person church services.

“We opened in June 2020, and we have not stopped,” says Lead Pastor Jeremy Mcgarity. “We have grown from 1,700 people to more than 5,200 people during the pandemic — and not one outbreak happened at Skyline.”

While Lent — a traditional 40-day period marking the time Jesus fasted in the desert while being tempted by Satan — isn’t observed in the same way by all Christian churches, it is nevertheless a time for growth, change and improvement in people’s spiritual and personal lives.

“We do not follow the traditional Lenten calendar,” says Mcgarity. “We truly try to help people have a Lenten attitude of growth in Christ seven days a week.”

“While we will acknowledge Lent and explain the meaning, we don’t refer to it much,” he adds. “We believe people should be growing every day, all the time — it’s about progress, not perfection.”

During Lent or in a pandemic, he notes, “every day, we work to bring people the spiritual, emotional, mental and physical nourishment they need. Whether it’s Lent or not, that’s our goal — becoming a community.”

Spiritual spring cleaning

For a world where so much change and turmoil has occurred — and one in which people were encouraged to burrow into their homes and remain isolated — the idea of Lent changing and improving our lives may be attractive, or it may prompt anxiety.

“We are always summoned during Lent to change our hearts and lives,” writes Rebekah Simon-peter in a January blog on the Ministry Matters website. “Yet too much has changed already. We’ve missed celebrating birthday parties, graduations, wedding anniversaries, even weddings themselves.

“We’ve watched as people turned on each other in church and society, and we experience heartache as friendships are lost, damaged, even destroyed,” Simon-peter sats in “Making Plans for Lent,” published on the site created for church leaders. “Fighting across the aisle has been turned up to a level that borders on uncivilized.”

In the midst of this, however, she notes that the traditions, ceremonies and sacrifices of Lent provide a firm, familiar foundation for Christians who have felt hurt, lost and injured in the pandemic.

Likening Lent in the third year of the pandemic to Jesus’ third fall on the road to Calvary, Catholic News Service writer Carol

Zimmerman nevertheless says many people are focused more on the season’s path to Easter and how this Lent coincides with an optimism about dropping COVID-19 case rates.

Zarate observes that the Lenten season, which coincides with spring, is a perfect time for the faithful to conduct a sort of spiritual “spring cleaning.”

He believes this time of renewal especially offers Christians the freedom and opportunity to deepen their faith.

“Lent is a period of waiting and preparation from Ash Wednesday to Easter,” he says. “There’s always an element of penance, change and renewal. Many times we consider all the things we are not doing during Lent, but it’s also a chance for us to improve ourselves.”

Period of reflection

Poet Tess Taylor writes that her opinion of Lent and its purpose changed dramatically after she visited an ancient Irish castle.

“A plaque described how after the big feast and hunting seasons (you’d hunt in the fall and freeze meat for the cold winter), the community came together to feast once more before entering Lent, when they’d essentially live on oats and peas for six weeks until spring came,” Taylor wrote in a CNN Opinion blog posted last year. “Their late-winter feast was a stone soup affair — inviting the town to put out the best things they’d been hoarding — a last hurrah before, as a community, the times became thinner.

“Looking out at the rainy landscape of Ireland, I understood the gesture: There was not much to harvest. The community fasted partly because the earth was at rest.”

Suddenly, she says, she understood Lent differently.

“I now saw this season and its sacrifices as rooted in both ecological and communal principles — a practice undertaken by and for community so that people could care for one another and the land in a lean time.”

Lent is always a somber time, says Kevin Eckery, deacon at Coronado’s Sacred Heart Church.

“We dig into Lent to examine our lives and look to renew our relationship with God,” Eckery notes. “We must, through prayer, fasting and almsgiving, experience a period of reflection before we can grasp the beauty of Easter.”

During the dark days of the pandemic’s first two years, he adds, “we were all feeling like we were in the desert.”

Now that observant Christians are heading back to worship together in church, he says, the Easter Sunday celebration of Christ’s resurrection — April 17 this year — marks a victory over darkness in tandem with Christians’ own awakening.

As health experts note the ebbing pandemic, he says, “things look a lot better.”

“We are seeing a light the end of the tunnel, and Easter is a nice time to celebrate that.”

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