As the Deer

Lent begins forty days, minus Sundays, before the first Sunday after the first full moon after the vernal equinox.  (Vernal in the northern hemisphere, that is.)  For the mathematically challenged, Lent begins the week after Wendy’s and Arby’s start advertising fish sandwiches.

I came late to Lent.  My family didn’t attend church till my teenage years, and the Presbyterian church we joined didn’t observe Lent.  So my earliest experience of Lent happened as a first-year student at Princeton Seminary.  We walked up the steps to Miller Chapel one Wednesday in February and inside received the mark of ashes on our foreheads.  Then we shuffled off to Stuart Hall for NT01 with Dr. Paul Meyer, a New Testament scholar.  He went to the podium and looked out over 150 students, all with dark smudges on their faces.  His had no such mark.  He sighed and said, “You are playing with a tradition that doesn’t belong to you.”

The observance of Lent has grown common in Protestant churches.  I’ve distributed ashes many times.  In our congregation, we receive the mark of ashes on the back of the hand to symbolize Jesus’ wounds.  Parishioners tell me how meaningful this ritual is to them and how grateful they are to see the confirmation students lead the Ash Wednesday service.  I understand the importance of these things in nurturing faith, and I am happy to facilitate them.  But Dr. Meyer’s words linger in my mind, and this time of year I feel as though I’m dabbling in something foreign to my native faith.

Many Protestants who grew up apart from a liturgical tradition hunger to experience as much of it as possible.  I am moving in an opposite direction, toward a daily life in the Spirit rather than a religion of the calendar.   Not that one precludes the other, but calendars tend to become ends instead of a means to an end.  In my spiritual life, I’m looking for a simple faith that doesn’t calculate Holy Days or consult tables of readings.  Nature’s seasons nurture me more than the church’s artificial ones.

It’s good to observe Lent, and it’s good not to observe Lent — to see all times as full of the presence of Christ and all seasons as opportunities for repentance and trust.