Monday, March 10, 2025
Happy Monday, my friends! I’m pausing my series on disability this week to address the season of Lent which began last Wednesday and whose first Sunday we celebrated yesterday. The word “Lent” is particularly old having roots in Old Saxon, Old High German, and Middle Dutch all referring to the lengthening of the days in the season we know as spring. However, Lent in the church as well as in popular imagination has come to represent a time of turning inward, entering deeper reflection, and lamenting our personal and collective sins. Many of us know Lent as a time when we give up something or practice some form of fast or austerity. Growing up Roman Catholic, we were told to abstain from meat on Fridays. Traditionalist Catholics—the ones who abstain from meat on Fridays year-round—will also give up sweets or some other food or drink.
Lent is not usually thought of as a happy time in the church year and in churches and traditions which do not rely on the lectionary and the church’s liturgical calendar, Lent can easily become something we put in the back of our minds. Yes, Lent is a time for lament, but like Lent, lament is often misunderstood. Cole Arthur Riley says that “Lament is not a threat to our survival but a means to it…When you practice lament with intentionality, you claim agency in your own emotional life. It’s not a sinking, it’s a steadying.”[1] Lament is prophetic because it imagines a different world; a world we hope to see and that we want to see. Lament helps group us in a spirit and place of hope.
During Lent we prepare for the death of Jesus, but we do so with the hope of the resurrection. The hope of the resurrection includes the hope we have for a different and better world. We are invited into that hope through lament.
Where are you finding hope? What kind of world do you hope for?
Let us pray: “Go in freedom, with tearstained cheeks and stability of heart. Feel deeply and honestly, without being consumed. May God protect your grief from those who have everything to gain from its erasure. And may God have mercy of you and cradle you as you dare cry out for comfort in your own time. Amen.”[2]
Blessings on your weeks, my friends! Let me know if there’s anything I can do for you.
Faithfully,
Ben
[1] Cole Arthur Riley, Black Liturgies, (New York: Convergent, 2024), 86.
[2] Adapted from two prayers in Riley, Black Liturgies, 94.
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