Tired of Running: An Invitation to Lent

Ash Wednesday dawned wet and raw this morning.  The heavy air has a bite to it, almost like the world knows today is a hard day for many of us. And with the dawn of the day, Lent begins, a season of the Church year that for some carries deep associations with guilt coupled with directives for strict practice: giving things up and feeling sorry for our sins and reflecting on what needs to change.

These are, of course, not bad things in themselves, but sometimes it feels like they add up to incontrovertible evidence of our abject failure.  And trumpeting that evidence for forty days seems wholly unnecessary in a world where most things seem rigged toward failure and despair most of the time anyway.  Right???

But I wonder what would happen if we tried to think of Lent in a different way. What if Lent felt almost like…relief?  You know, kind of like in yoga class when they make you take a deep breath and let it out in a very dramatic way?  If we let it, Lent can be like permission, permission to admit what is obvious to everybody: that we’re all broken and we hurt a lot sometimes, and that on the regular we’re unable to face truths about ourselves because we think they disqualify us from being worthy of love.  

This feeling is reasonable, as the world around us demands that we always show up with our shiny sides turned outward facing—false advertising to convince everyone, most especially ourselves, that we’re a little better than the norm, maybe not *quite* as broken or human as everyone else. Which is, of course, a lie.

And so, it’s Lent and I feel relieved.  Ready to surrender.  And I’m not alone in the sentiment. I can hear the same feelings when I read the words of David in Psalm 139. This beautiful Psalm is a hopeful lament, if such a thing exists, because David has tried and tried and tried some more to be the best, the most successful, the most accomplished—to live up to the reputation he earned early on, slingshot in hand.

Since the very beginning, though, David tried mightily to keep the facade shiny and studiously untarnished.  He didn’t succeed so well, struggling as he infamously did with pride…and infidelity…and jealousy…and fear…and broken relationships; that is, all the normal stuff of being human.

And as the Psalm so eloquently reveals, no matter how hard David tried he could not hide who he really was from God.  His hopeful lament in this Psalm reads just like relieved surrender: “I’m really good at this, at showing my perfect self to the world.  But no matter how hard I try—where I go, how I contort reality, what kind of social media presence I construct—I cannot remove myself from the truth-baring gaze of my Creator.”

And that’s where surrender and longing meet.  Our Type A, Overachieving King of Israel flies the white flag because he knows that there is nothing he can do to keep God from seeing the real him, tarnish and all. And, as the gaze of the Divine turns in his direction, David also, suddenly, feels something else: pure, unadulterated love that finally, finally corners him and confronts him with its tenacious unwillingness to let him go.  

…broken wide open, bare for all to see, and loved beyond anything he’d ever known before…

Because, as it turns out, broken is beautiful, and it’s worthy of love.  Maybe the deepest kind of love, the kind that won’t stop pulling at our coattails until we finally turn around and, with relief, let it come right in and make itself at home.

This reminds me of a story from writer Anne Lamott:

“I got pregnant in April, right around my thirtieth birthday, but was so loaded every night that the next morning’s first urine was too diluted for a pregnancy test to prove positive. I was often sick in the morning. On weekdays, I put coffee on, went for a run, took a shower, had coffee, maybe some speed, a thousand cigarettes, and then tried to write. On weekends, I went to the flea market.

If I happened to be there between eleven and one on Sundays, I could hear gospel music coming from a church right across the street. The church looked homely and impoverished, a ramshackle building with a cross on top, sitting on a small parcel of land with a few skinny pine trees. But the music wafting out was so pretty that I would stop and listen….  

I went back to the church about once a month. No one tried to con me into sitting down or staying. I always left before the sermon. I loved singing, even about Jesus, but I didn’t want to be preached at about him. To me, Jesus made about as much sense as Scientology or dowsing. But the church smelled wonderful, like the air had nourishment in it, or like it was composed of these people’s exhalations, of warmth and faith and peace….  

I didn’t go to the flea market the week of my abortion. I stayed home, and smoked dope, and got drunk, and tried to write a little. On the seventh night, though, very drunk and just about to take a sleeping pill, I discovered that I was bleeding heavily. It did not stop over the next hour. I thought I should call a doctor, but I was so disgusted that I had gotten so drunk one week after an abortion that I just couldn’t wake someone up and ask for help. Several hours later, the blood stopped flowing, and I got in bed, shaky and sad. After awhile, as I lay there, I became aware of someone with me, hunkered down in the corner, and I just assumed it was my father, whose presence I had felt over the years when I was frightened and alone. The feeling was so strong that I actually turned on the light for a moment to make sure no one was there – of course, there wasn’t. But after awhile, in the dark again, I knew beyond any doubt that it was Jesus. I felt him as surely as I feel my dog lying nearby as I write this.

And I was appalled. I thought about my life and my brilliant hilarious progressive friends. I thought about what everyone would think of me if I became a Christian, and it seemed an utterly impossible thing that simply could not be allowed to happen. I turned to the wall and said out loud, ‘I would rather die.’

I felt him just sitting there on his haunches in the corner of my sleeping loft, watching me with patience and love, and I squinched my eyes shut, but that didn’t help because that’s not what I was seeing him with. Finally, I fell asleep and in the morning, he was gone.

The experience spooked me badly, but I thought it was just an apparition, born of fear and self-loathing and loss of blood. But then everywhere I went, I had the feeling that a little cat was following me, wanting me to reach down and pick it up, wanting me to open the door and let it in. But I knew what would happen: you let a cat in one time, give it a little milk, and then it stays forever. So I tried to keep one step ahead of it, slamming my house door whenever I entered or left.

And one week later, when I went back to church, I was so hungover that I couldn’t stand up for the songs, and this time I stayed for the sermon, which I thought was so ridiculous, like someone trying to convince me of the existence of extraterrestrials, but the last song was so deep and raw and pure that I could not escape. It was as if the people were singing in between the notes, weeping and joyful at the same time, and I felt like their voices or something was rocking me in its bosom, holding me like a scared kid, and I opened up to that feeling – and it washed over me.

I began to cry and left before the benediction, and I raced home and felt the little cat running along my heels, and I walked down the dock past dozens of potted flowers, under a sky as blue as one of God’s own dreams, and I opened the door to my house, and I stood there a minute, and then I hung my head and said, ‘[Okay,]. I quit.’ 

I took a long deep breath and said out loud, ‘All right. You can come in.’ 

So this is my beautiful moment of conversion.”

—from Traveling Mercies, by Anne Lamott.

Lent.  What if we just quit running and surrendered to love? Like in the words of the Psalmist: “I come to the end—I am still with You.”

What a relief.  Amen.