By Laura Turner in conversation with Karl Digerness
"This hill though high I covent ascend;
The difficulty will not me offend;
For I perceive the way of life lies here.
Come, pluck up, heart; let's neither faint nor fear. "
― John Bunyan, The Pilgrim's Progress
In the early years of the Christian church, a lot of Christians had a problem. The good news was that Rome had officially become a Christian state. The bad news, though, was that there were a lot of people who had turned their back on the church when Christians were being persecuted. So, in that time, the church was tasked with figuring out how to admit these people into the church that they had spurned.
The issues were plenty: people were angry, ashamed, remorseful. Imagine a church filled with the families of martyrs alongside people who had walked away from the faith in fear of their own lives. In order to bring people back into the fold, the church instituted a 40-day period of time during which these folks went through a discipline of prayer and self-denial. At the end of those 40 days--on Easter--they were received back into the church.
The good fruits of this time of self-denial and prayer were good enough that the whole church ended up participating; not just those who came back to the church from apostasy. So that is what we do now, together: we recognize these forty days of Lent as holy and set apart, just like every other season of the church calendar, only a little more so. Lent is a liminal place, a thin place, a time in which the curtains are pulled back just a bit and we get a glimpse of the dazzling and faithful presence of the divine. Just as heaven and this world meet on the Mount of the Transfiguration, the season ushered in by Ash Wednesday reminds us of the very physical reality of the spiritual world we inhabit.
The season of Lent is a cruciform journey in which we participate physically, as well as mentally and spiritually. Jesus, in his time in the wilderness, did for us what we now celebrate and emulate thousands of years later: He normalized journeying as a paradigm for life.
How many of us think, consciously or otherwise, that we must strive ceaselessly in our lives until we have somehow made successes of ourselves? How wholly do we buy into the illusion that we need what matters, and that what matters is security, comfort, satiation, the quenching of our appetites? This season of Lent does not give you the option of saying you have "arrived" as a Christian. In fact, it forces you to understand that the Christian life is and ever was a life of journeying and pilgrimage. This is what John Bunyan's Pilgrim understood so well when he spoke of "the way of life," the Sisyphean task with a twist: there is always hope. The rock is lighter than you knew.
In our downward journey to hope, we have as a journeyman our Lord and Savior and friend, Jesus Christ. And whatever journey we undertake, we undertake with him and through his strength. This is part of what the practice of fasting, or self-denial reminds us: We are not solely emotional or rational creatures. We are physical beings, embodied, engaged in the world around us. So when we deny ourselves in this season, we do two things: First, we pare down our lives in order to clear out distraction. We create room for reflection, by reading the Bible daily or leaving our televisions turned off or our computers shut down. And in so doing, we reach the second thing--we learn to identify the things on which we have been feasting that are not true bread or living water. We may be surprised by just how weightily we have been leaning on these things; how quickly we seem to fall without them to prop us up. This reminds us that our strength has never really been the issue.
During Lent, we move from Ash Wednesday to Easter Sunday in a long crawl of days. We receive the light that breaks into our world; we accept our own frailty; we journey up the high hill to the way of life. And we find that Jesus, who meets us there, has been next to us all along.
Preparing for Lent:
A Journey Together (Upcoming Events)