Dear Friends,
Here we are, standing on the cusp of Lent. It is, as I’ve surely said here before, is my favorite part of the liturgical year. After all, unlike Advent, the season isn’t overrun by a secular refusal to wait; Easter doesn’t arrive early with the same sort of force we see with Christmas. And, of course, there’s the deep emphasis on our mortality that come with Lent. When else in this world do we really get to be honest about the fact that death comes for us all? All Souls comes close, but the imposition of ashes – nothing else comes close to that.
When it comes to Lent, the simplest way to describe what draws me in is to say that it’s a time that encourages us to dwell in the narrow place, something Sarah Wildman beautifully describes in her recent guest essay for the New York Times (gift link). Writing about her family’s experience of her now teen daughter’s liver cancer, Wildman notes that:
It is not the first time we have been in what rabbis call the meitzar, the biblical narrow place — a place of compression. The meitzar is an expression of all the things that can make life impossibly hard. It appears in Psalm 118: From the narrow place I called to God, the psalm says; I was answered, it continues, from expansiveness.
We all encounter the narrow places sometimes, to varying extremes, and I think I am particularly comfortable with these places because I spent so much of my youth there. Plagued by deep depression from my early teens to my mid-twenties, I felt like what Kate Bowler calls “the bad thing”
Living with depression or chronic illness or other difficult, unresolvable suffering can be more uncomfortable for those around us than for those of us in the midst of them. This isn’t always true, of course, but it is frequently the case. Our discomfort is disquieting to others. They are pained by proximity and disillusionment. They worry they may be forced into the narrow place, too. Meanwhile, so many of us who are busy feeling like the bad thing are already deeply aware of the God that calls back to us from expansiveness. We feel like the bad thing, but we already know that God is with us there.
Beyond Simple Incarnation
Most of us don’t want to take children into the narrow places unless we have to. That’s something at the core of Wildman’s essay – her 14 year old daughter demonstrates a readiness to take on traumatic topics beyond her years because her own life is traumatic beyond what should be expected of her. Unfortunately, that’s true for so many children – those living in poverty, with serious illness, abused or witnessing domestic violence, residing amidst war. And while it would be theologically wrong to claim these things are necessary, it is the presence of God in these narrow or dark places that sustain us through them. As Barbara Brown Taylor notes in Learning to Walk in the Dark:
At the worst of times, God resources us, giving us the tools we need to make our way through this space, however long it takes. And the beauty of Lent is that, for those who experience little darkness or narrowness in their lives, this season is an invitation to carry a small measure of it.
Many of my favorite resources for families during Lent invite us into these challenging places in extraordinary ways. Among my favorites are:
God is Still With Us (Illustrated Ministry): Drawing on the many ways God is with God’s people throughout the challenges found in the Bible (enslaved in Egypt, wandering in the desert, as and with Jesus on the cross), this devotional helps us see how God continues to be with us now.
This is My Body (Illustrated Ministry): The newest devotional from IM, I’ve been loving the company’s graphics talking about how through his incarnation, Jesus knew all of the difficulties of embodiment. Sure, he may not have lived through old age or had period cramps, but just as we do not share all of the same aspects of embodiment with each other, we can still empathize with them because we too live in bodies.
Scorning Shame (Word & Wonder - plus, it’s free): There are a few things I don’t love about this devotional, like the forbidden A-word of Lent in hymns and some of the implications around disability and brokenness, which is an ongoing struggle when it comes to healing stories. That being said, the through-line of this program is that God does not want us to live with feelings of guilt and shame, that we were made whole and that we are called to connection and community. It also provides some really valuable for supports for being forthright about our sins and engaging in the confession because confession reunites us with God. It’s not a perfect program, but it’s free and easy to use at home, which is its own advantage.
Bless the Lent We Actually Have (Kate Bowler, free & for the grown-ups): Last week, I had therapy in my office at work and I showed my therapist the Kate Bowler pennants hanging on my bulletin board. They read “No Cure for Being Human” and “Bless the lives we actually have.” The thing is, Kate Bowler knows about the narrow places and the revelatory darkness. This year’s Lent devotional pairs with Bowler & Jessica Richie’s newest prayer book and let us be present to whatever comes our way. We don’t have to do it all or manage the perfect penance. We just have to show up before God and our neighbor and ourselves and be honest.
Being Human, Being Honest
(tw: suicide)
I’m a millennial, which means this morning when I was avoiding getting out of bed during this long weekend, I was scrolling through TikTok (which, again, as a millennial, I joined rather belatedly) when I saw a video of a mother and her two small daughters. The woman was responding to a question about how she will explain her husband’s suicide to her daughters when the time is right, and the woman explained that this wasn’t information she had ever withheld.
Though the younger child was still too young to speak, the older repeated how her mother had explained things: her dad hadn’t felt well. He felt like he didn’t belong here and the feeling took over his heart and his brain and he died. He died from suicide. It was such a true and succinct description and I thought of it again as I reviewed the Scorning Shame materials again. Those materials include the following preface:
Anything mentionable is manageable
Fred Rogers is one of my favorite role models for working with children. As he said, “Anything that’s human is mentionable, and anything that is mentionable can be more manageable. When we can talk about our feelings, they become less overwhelming, less upsetting and less scary.”
To be honest, I don’t actually like Mr. Rogers, but I like this a lot, and it’s exactly what this mother offered her daughters, and it’s what Lent has the potential to offer us. Anything mentionable is manageable, even if we have to call it out from within the narrow places.
What will we open ourselves to in the name of rejecting shame and coming closer to God this Lent? How will we open our eyes and hearts to mortality with equanimity rather than fear? May we bless the lessons we learn in the dark, that save us time and time again. May be know that we are heard by God, even when we cry out from the narrowest of places. May be draw closer to God this Lent. And may we enjoy some pancakes first.
Peace,
Bird