It's already Lent and so far we've had a relatively snow-free winter here in Hanover County, Va. While the schools provided the kids with a couple of delayed openings and at least one “just in case” closing, there hasn't really been any of the white stuff on the ground.
We haven't given up hope. I remember our neighbor's forsythia gloriously golden and covered with snow. But when our children see the householders in Oswego, N.Y., trying to remove 10 feet of snow before their roofs collapse, they have one response, “No fair! Some people have all the luck!”
As others before have observed, it's all a matter of perspective.
What the snow brings us is what it takes away. It's not only that a familiar landscape disappears. It's that the snow makes time for all sorts of things. Schools are closed, highways as well. And since we can't be about all the business (or busy-ness) that we're supposed to be about, we have time for things we never had time for — sledding, snuggling under comforters, drinking hot chocolate.
Through the process of subtraction, we add the value and the meaning of life.
The season of Lent asks us to do something that is at the same time counter-cultural and counter-intuitive. It asks us to give up in order to receive.
Recently, I read the advice of a church-growth expert urging us to translate the language of the church into language and images that the world around us will find comfortable. But stop for a moment and imagine the ways that we are bombarded — nonstop streams of information about Brittany or Anna Nicole or the presidential candidates (already!) or the war in Iraq (still!).
How are we to sort all this out or put it into perspective? How are we to understand what is really important? Without any distance it becomes impossible to discern the greater from the lesser, the ephemeral from the really important.
And it is this blurring of boundaries and distinctions that accounts for so much of the madness in the world around us.
Like many Baptists — indeed, like many Protestants — I grew up in a church environment where the liturgical year, if we knew about it at all, was viewed with some suspicion. Now many Baptist churches participate. This is a good idea on a number of levels.
First of all, it allows us to enter more fully into the life of Jesus. In a small way, during the season of Lent, we are making the fasting and praying of Jesus for us a real part of our daily lives.
Secondly, we embody our solidarity and communion with our brothers and sisters in Christ across the world and across the centuries. It is not only humbling; it is inspiring to realize that we are putting into daily practice what Christians for almost 2,000 years have been doing.
And finally, we are blessed. We have in our hands the means of freeing ourselves from other stories and practices that would have us believe that we alone determine our true desires. We deny ourselves food or other things not because such denial is, in and of itself, good but because fasting prepares us to desire more fully what God desires. Fasting forms us to see that becoming Christ's body requires a reorientation of desire, one that enables us ultimately to taste the abundance of God more fully.
In the Christian year, feasting follows fasting. Easter follows Lent. Through this pattern of fasting and feasting, the church reenacts the death and resurrection of Christ. “Feast” is thus a meaningless concept apart from the idea of “fast.” Both practices train us to wait and to desire the fullness of God's kingdom, even as we celebrate its reality in our midst.
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— Beth Newman is Professor of Theology and Ethics at Baptist Theological Seminary at Richmond. [email protected]