Forget about that March fantasy which, if you’re like me, you’ve lately been experiencing as you’ve been contemplating all the snow: can spring be far away? Never mind the weather, actually. It’s still Lent. Sorry.
But which Lent? Many of us who’ve been keeping Lent in some fashion, I dare say, have been experiencing a dour Lent, six weeks of pondering our failures and shortcomings and then, hopefully, along the way, hearing “the forgiveness of sins, life, and salvation” (Luther) proclaimed in church, after which we consider how to find more faithful ways to be followers of our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ.
Let’s hear it for this dour Lent. What a relief it is to be able to shuck off the pretense of thinking about ourselves as good Christians or even as Christians at all. Let it all hang out. In the sophisticated words that a young counselee once spoke to me when she was recounting how ungracious – her term was “stupid” – she had been when she had broken up with her boyfriend: “Jesus, what a jerk I was.” That was dour, and it made solid spiritual sense. It surely seems right, meet, and salutary, then, to aspire to have a dour Lent.
But there’s Deep as well as Dour. And I recommend that you explore this spirituality, too, as you live your way into Lent. Søren Kierkegaard thought of this kind of experience as swimming in waters that are forty-thousand fathoms deep. Or think of the novella by Franz Kafka, Die Verwandlung (The Metamorphosis). Gregor wakes up one morning and discovers that he has become a beetle – and that he’s lying on his back and cannot move. He’s existentially paralyzed. That’s deep stuff.
Over the decades as a pastoral counselor, I met a number of Gregors, people who had a suffocating feeling that they’d been trapped, say, by substance abuse or by a hateful marriage or by intractable health or economic circumstances or by a life that just seemed to be going nowhere. For them, it often appeared, there was no way out, No Exit (Sartre). Sometimes such experiences have been called the dark night of the soul. Such things come to mind when I reflect about having a Deep Lent.
How to do that? Allow yourself to experience your own inner darkness this Lent, thrust upon you from within or without or both. Find a way to ponder the existential darkness that soldiers and civilians in Ukraine are experiencing every night. Recall losses of your own that have left you feeling as if you cannot see your way forward. Ponder, above all, the hours of darkness that enveloped Jesus in his dying woes on the Cross.
Then, if you can, find a hymn for the Lenten season that speaks to you personally. Read it slowly out loud when you’re alone. Hum the tune if you can, say, when you’re in your car on your way to work. Even perchance, if you can find a secluded place, sing that hymn at the top of your voice.
For example: the simple folk hymn that many Americans have known best from the mass revivals of the great evangelist, Billy Graham – “Just as I am.” I, for one, learned to love that hymn as a boy and I’ve loved it ever since. It was composed by a Victorian hymn writer, Charlotte Elliott, who at age 32 suffered a serious illness that left her disabled for the rest of her life. Words like these, I believe, can inspire you and me to experience not just a dour, but also a deep Lent:
Just as I am, without one plea, But that thy blood was shed for me, And that thou bidd’st me come to thee, O Lamb of God, I come, I come…. Just as I am, though tossed about With many a conflict, many a doubt, Fightings and fears within, without, O Lamb of God, I come, I come.
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