Dear Friends,
Growing up, I found Lent extraordinarily confusing. My Lutheran church was only moderately liturgical, and many of my childhood friends were Catholic. My father was, at the time, also a lapsed Catholic. As a result, I heard a lot of conversation about what people were giving up for Lent and, on many Fridays, my paternal grandmother would call and interrogate my father, wondering if he had abstained from meat (he never did).
As a bystander to these practices, nothing about these practices seemed obviously religious, and the associated chatter didn’t shed light on any of the underlying meaning. Surely, I thought, something existed in the interstitial gaps between what I heard and what was actually happening.
I first began to understand what was happening in those questions and conversations when I was a teenager, and the explanation that so powerfully began to clarify the situation was one that turned those first snippets inside out and upside down. Yes, these practices are often about discipline, I came to understand, but we could separate discipline and deprivation. What if instead of deprivation, our Lenten practice was about increasing our acts of goodness and charity and care? What if we added instead of subtracting?
Now, this additive approach to Lent has been popular for years now, particularly in progressive circles, but in the mid-2000s this was news to me. And all these years later, I remain taken by this reversal.
Inverting Everything
Here’s the thing Jesus shows us time and time again: His life and work turns everything upside down and forces us to reconsider everything we thought we knew. We take this idea to its most literal end in Godly Play in the story of the Mystery of Easter. There we are with our strange bag of puzzle pieces trying to figure out what these strange materials mean, only to flip everything over. The cross is reversed. The bag is turned inside out. Serious and royal purple becomes celebratory white. Nothing is as it was before. What a strange and glorious surprise that we are fortunate enough to have revealed to us.
Right now, of course, the mystery is still approaching. The King who came and died and came back again hasn’t embarked on this central journey yet. We still have a moment to get ready. So what do we do now?
Naming God
Certainly like many of you, I have been hard at work preparing Lent materials for my congregation. And one of the activities amongst these materials explores the names of God. I’m taken by this activity because when we name God in new ways and explore those different aspects of God we discover new ways of being in relationship with the sacred.
This isn’t necessarily just a Lenten practice, of course, and there’s no reason you couldn’t pick up this idea any time. Or meditate on other related ideas. For example, I’ve been doing a lot of fiber arts craft and I’m particularly taken by the epitaph for Mary, “Our Lady, Undoer of Knots.” It’s a sacred name that resonates with me, and it reveals another aspect of Mary that I might not have discovered otherwise.
Maybe for Lent or just on some random Tuesday, you’ll find a little room to explore who God is to you. Maybe you’ll discover personal names for God that help you see that relationship in new ways that stretch beyond scripture. Language is this most extraordinary and revelatory thing and I love to sit with its possibilities.
May Our Lady, Undoer of Knots attend to any tangles in your life, today and always.
Peace,
Bird