“It is winter in Narnia,” said Mr. Tumnus, “and has been for ever so long…. always winter, but never Christmas.”
C.S. Lewis, The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe
If I am being completely honest I don’t always get Easter. I don’t get the women approaching the tomb, the rock having been rolled away, the men sitting at the place where Jesus’s head and feet formerly were, Mary Magdalene and the gardener, John and the one whom Jesus loved tearing down the streets of Jerusalem in the early morning and seeing that the grave was indeed empty. I don’t always get the sense of unbridled joy and excitement that Easter Sunday elicits in so many.
On the other hand, I love Lent. It is, without a close second, the most meaningful time in the Christian calendar for me. My brain is wired to be an existentialist. That is, I consider my own existence and eventual non-existence far more than say the average person might. I function far better in the cimmerian shade as it seeks to swallow the light than I do in the light that the shade is never able to fully overcome. Put another way, in more traditional language, I am far more comfortably wallowing in my sin than I could ever be living into redemption, whatever that might mean to someone.
We in the church, at least most of us, come to this time every year and we immediately find ourselves on the outside looking in when around our non-Christian, non-religious friends and family. In our efforts to approximate that which tradition suggests Jesus gave up, we often will not partake in some relatively minor treat, activity, guilty pleasure. Our services, at least when we are in-person for worship, are more somber, contemplative, reserved. A pall becomes cast over the whole of the worlds of the faithful as we begin the ritual of preparing for Holy Week, considering what part of us must die in order that Christ might be resurrected in us. In the most traditional terms, we consider the weight of our personal sin, the sum total of all the sin in the world, the collective brokenness from which everyone needs to be redeemed. And all this puts us at odds with a world that doesn’t do contemplative well, a culture that never tells you to take only what you need and leave the rest for someone less fortunate, a society that does everything it can to deny the existence of aging, much less the cold truth of death. In normal times, there would be little to no intersection between those two streams of traffic running parallel with one another. This, it certainly need not be said, is not a normal time.
We, as a nation, as a world have been living through the 2020 Lenten journey which never bothered to go away the first time around. Easter Sunday of last year did eventually come and while we clergy and other religious leaders did our level best to make the Sunday in which we mark the resurrection of the savior celebratory and special, the magic and the joy of such a moment really isn’t translatable through the screen of one’s computer and so the Lenten mood, if not the actual season, at least, drug on.
On the parallel road from our own—the one occupied by the larger nation—folks found themselves trapped in the experience of near uncontrollable illness hospitalizing and/or killing the stranger, the neighbor, the family member, the friend. The feeling that many were feeling could properly be called Lenten even if they had no idea what that word meant and as time continued its inexorable march towards some unknown the people who hadn’t darkened the door of a church in a long time began to feel the need to search for something more permanent than their perishable bodies as a new spirit slowly began to reveal itself.
At the same time, the weight of quarantine and pandemic, the loss of friends and routine, the seeming disappearance of all the trappings of our faith, and the need to find God in familiar locales submerged many of the faithful deeper into the ritual of Lent. And then it happened (if only for a split second). Those on the outside of the church building reaching up in a desperate search for God and those faithful being plunged down into the depths of the unknown reached an equilibrium with one another—hovering somewhere in the middle like scuba divers who have achieved buoyancy above the ocean floor. And here we both dwell. Unified, for the first time in a long time, by the same specter of sickness and mortality that continues to be on display all around us.
We have reached a moment as we, at least on the calendar, begin a new Lenten journey. We have an opportunity to truly reach out to the one who doesn’t do church and invite them, not to a worship service, but, rather to join with us on this journey as together we walk into the unknown, the faithful possessing the foundations of organization and hope, those who heretofore have dwelt outside the doors of the church feeling the energy and excitement that comes at the beginning of an epic odyssey in which the future is cloudy but still with the little burst of energy that can lift you and all those with you up in the chaotic power.
This is not going to be an easy Lenten journey this time around. We are tired, we are weak, we are worn. This is why we must seek to carry each other—both those with whom we have shared a lifetime and the ones who were strangers in the previous moment. This is how the gospel of Christ Jesus becomes real, again. This is how the church will be resurrected. This is how we will all be redeemed. Let’s get going.