Lent is a season, and not a deadline to be met

So how is your Lent going?

You say you forgot to get ashes on Ash Wednesday?

You say you obeyed the rules for fasting, but you had two big small meals and one gigantic main meal?

You say you abstained from meat, and for your penance you had the smoked salmon filet, or was it the king crab?

Is that what’s troubling you, friend?

I have a tendency to focus on the wrong things. I feel disheartened because I have not made a good start for Lent. I feel discouraged, and I want to give up before I have even begun. I focus on the letter and not the spirit. I have had some faint glimmer that this Lent would be different, but even so soon it is a weakening ember of hope.

I need the Lord’s help to abandon my scrupulosity. I need His help to understand that Lent is not a rigid schedule of fixed dates, a make-it-or-break-it deadline to get going or bust. I need His help to see that Lent is a season, like springtime. The calendar says that spring has not yet come, but already I have felt the warmth of sun amid the cool days. I have been invigorated by air that makes life worth living.

Would that the Lord would let me see that it’s always now, and never any other time. Let this day be that springtime day that comes unannounced, off schedule like a child’s hilarity, like a crocus in the snow.

I would be free of the shackles of my own rigidity, the smokescreen of excuses for my unwillingness to change. I need the Lord to show me in my heart that Lent didn’t begin without me, that Lent awaits me like a kind friend rejoices as his tardy companion arrives.

It’s funny how desperately I cling to the old way, as if I refuse abundant life. I can’t understand how I let myself be strapped by the lamest reasons like: It’s too late! I didn’t start on time! Bosh. Have I forgotten that the Christians sang in the Colosseum? Did not all the saints speak always and everywhere of joy? St. Augustine cried out, “How late have I loved thee, Lord!” St. Augustine, intercede for this foot-dragger.

The Lord made this day just as He made all the others. I need Him to open my eyes to the great power that comes from Him to turn my heart away from habit and self-seeking.

I have bought into the ways of the world, and my justification system is elaborate. Rather than renounce it, I have found ways to incorporate its values into mine. Surely my ideals have become gilded and spread about with cushions and lots of articulate and wise rationale.

I have accepted the cravings of the flesh, preferred the darkness, the solitary prison of half-measures. Innuendo is okay. Off color is funny. I don’t want the jeering labels of radical, prude, straight-laced.

I have listened to the devil’s lies, though I know that God’s kingdom is not a democracy.

If you didn’t get ashes and your fast was more like a feast; if your abstinence has been a delicious change of pace, Lent was made for folks like you and me. This isn’t late. This is now. –T.R.

written by Thomas A. Russell
first published in the Lafayette Sunday Visitor on March 8th, 1987