Lent: To Everything there is a Season…a time to mourn.
For over 2,000 years Christians acknowledged a season which has come to be known as Lent. Lent is a season where we give up something we love, sacrifice for the better good, and “repent” of what we have done wrong. Such “giving up” or repenting is suppose to prepare us for better days. Ironically, before Lent starts, there is the biggest dirtiest party of them all, Mardi Gras. This is actually a few days of time from Epiphany Sunday to Fat Tuesday night where you eat and party before you start your “fast.” And boyhawdy, do some people party! I’d love to go down to New Orleans for Mardi Gras or Venice for Carnival. People put on masks, go to balls and dances, and eat—or as my brother would have said it, “pig out.” Of course, many have a more bawdy time filled with drinking, drugs and sex. So by the time Ash Wednesday comes, they are certain to have something to “repent” about, and if they don’t remember it’s only because they have a hangover.
That’s what has happened to this season, it brings out the worst in us hoping for the best to come. It is captured in the idea of “getting it out of your system.” My grandpa said I should go try a drink of whisky with him, so that I would know how much I don’t like it, and I would thereby get it out of my mind as a “temptation.” His hope was thereafter if somebody offered me a drink of alcohol I could honestly answer, “hate the stuff and wouldn’t have anything to do with it, thank you very much.” It’s also the idea of “sowing your wild oats” as a youth. Even King David speaks of “the sins of his youth,” where we do stupid things, things we look back on and say “I cannot believe I did that!” And we can reply, “well, at least you got it out of your system.” Strangely, for some this is true but for others they end up in a life of stupid: addicted to what eventually destroys their humanity.
It’s interesting that the season of Lent happens every year. It’s also honest. We try to do good, try to succeed; too often we only succeed at doing bad. Most of us need a New Year, a new day to try again. I too believe the old motto, “if at first you don’t succeed, try try again.” Sometimes what stops us from being able to “try, try again” is our feeling of being responsible for the failure, or of being overwhelmed by all that we have done wrong. We don’t even want to give ourselves another chance, perhaps we feel we don’t deserve it, or perhaps we fear we will only fail all the more horridly. At times we just don’t have the energy to try again. We are tired, fallen and cannot get up. It’s no mistake that this season of Lent is associated with the Flood of Noah and the end of his world. Sometimes life feels like it is submerged in the flood waters in which we are drowning. We drown in financial debt, marital dismay, emotional upset, relationship breakup, addictions, stupid choices, social injustice… you know the list, you’ve have your own. Everyone feels overwhelmed, some drown.
The truth is that bad builds, stupid breeds, and evil grows. So our debts goes out of control, our relationships grow further apart, the depression worsens, and the pit we are in gets deeper. When we were young it was owing someone one dollar, now it’s more like thousands. When we were young it was breaking up with our teenage crush, now it’s our wife or husband. When we were young it was failing a test, now it is failing at our job. It feels the same, the child feels just as “failed” as the adult. And at times life can overwhelm us, it’s not really about the proportion of our failure, hurts or struggle—they all feel the same. For this reason teenage suicide is all too real, as an adult you might look at that suicide say, “if only they had hung on, they would see that life gets better.” We can see and even understand their despair over the loss of their first love, hurt from “not fitting in,” or even their addictions. We understand these because we have either seen it before or lived through it ourselves. But for them, it’s the first time. For others it is the millionth time, because they haven’t learned how to overcome. For these adults it is the failure over the years that build up and drown them.
I believe part of the problem is we live in a world where only victory is acknowledged, believed in and supported. To win the race is better than to lose it. To be poor is not as good as it is to be rich. To be happy is better than to be sad. To be successful is better than to have failed. To be athletic and fit is better than being slow and fat. To be holy is better than being a sinner. To be perfect is better than being flawed. We measure our live and train our kids to be perfect, ideal and victorious. We preach a victorious Christ, not a poor, suffering and crucified Christ. We have not taught our kids or ourselves how to fail, how to suffer, how to have sorrow. Instead we have associated these things with evil and therefore we have only taught how to shun them. I know I do, I hate suffering and pain, I don’t want to have to have sorrow.
That’s where the biblical narrative is helpful. Noah lived in a time of super beings who lived selfishly and were “evil” come to earth. The Hebrew Children had 400 years in a land where they ended up slaves followed by 40 years in wilderness desert with little food or water. Jesus wondered in a desert for 40 days, followed by 3 years of trying to save the world for 3 years only to be killed for it. Scripture acknowledged the fact the human life has a lot of pain and suffering. It acknowledges the fact the humanity has a self-destructive pattern that can even be seasonal. We need to retrain ourselves and our youth. We need to understand that failure is part of success, even as death is part of life, and that mourning is the flipside of joy. This shouldn’t surprise us, as the Beatles sang “to everything there is a season—turn, turn, turn!” Oh, wait, they got that from the Bible (Ecclesiastes 4).
What can we learn? As Christmas was the time to celebrate and to learn to acknowledge love and joy, Lent is the time to mourn, to pass through sorrows and brokenness. Lent might seem like some pompous religious effort to drag us down, if that is true then forget it. But if you actually do feel overwhelmed, depressed, struggling to live life well, and hurt—then Lent is for you. Because the whole point of Lent isn’t the flood, but the Ark that saved humanity from it. It isn’t only about Jesus being tempted, but about how he overcame temptation, and how after he was murdered, he went to Hell to be with us and help lead us out. Lent is an acknowledgement that things go wrong, we go wrong, do wrong. Death and despair happen, but that there is a way through the darkness of our soul, the wilderness of our suffering, the floods of despair: We can see the light, find the promised land and be sail above the flood waters.
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