I have a confession to make: I’m not giving anything up for Lent.
Simply put, I don’t have to. As crazy and miraculous as it sounds, the Holy Spirit does this for me.
It wasn’t always like this. Like many others – a group that seems to be growing, for I’ve even recently heard of non-practicing Christians giving things up, as wild as this sounds – I was quick to blithely and ceremoniously focus my desire for self-restraint on such things as sweets or social media. I suppose I enjoyed the commonality, the perceived priesthood of semi-believers (I’m only half joking here), until one day, smack dab in the middle of my self-imposition, which resembled a sad attempt to mimic the hunger artist in the Kafka story of the same name, a real crisis came my way.
Never mind what it was; the point is, I didn’t like it very much. It’s not difficult to say why, because the real Lent – which I would describe as a truer, tete-a-tete confrontation with one’s own fallenness – carried with it something that my previous attempts had lacked: discomfort.
The next year, the same thing happened. I can’t remember what I gave up, but probably something silly like cable news or carbonated soda. Then – wham! Another crisis whose trajectory I simply failed to anticipate.
Could it be? I thought. Is it possible that Lent is … real?
I knew before asking it that the answer was yes. The Spirit understands groanings that words can’t comprehend, say the Scriptures. So, too, do the psychologists talk of the subconscious that is never really at rest, particularly when we sleep – at work like the seven dwarves of Snow White, was how one of my professors described it.
What I did not know was exactly how. How could it be that, in the face of all tradition and in contrast to my own feeble attempts, it was the Cosmos itself that was in charge of Lent, and that the rest of us were but minor players, stand-ins for a bit part whose Principle Actor was Someone Else entirely?
In the words of St. Paul at Mars Hill:
Men of Athens, I observe that you are very religious in all respects … [But] what you worship in ignorance, this I proclaim to you. The God who made the world and everything in it … [is not] served by human hands … since he Himself gives to all people life and breath and all things; and he made from one man every nation of mankind to live on all the face of the earth … that they would seek God … though he is not far from each one of us….
This is what I want to say, that he is not far from any of us. It might seem that way, for our efforts, including my own, tend to push Him away. But in the end, our efforts are puny compared to his enormous staying power.
So, at least this year, this is what I think Lent’s purpose is: to recognize what the great doctors of the Church called the “omnipresence of God.” No doubt many have heard it; but my guess is that the word invokes images of the far corners of the universe, followed by a tacit assent and maybe even a head nod that, yes, indeed, God is present even there. But he is much closer.
Ponder this, please, during this Lent, and shrink not nor flee from the vast and confounding mysteries of the Almighty.
Along with his father, Allen Keller runs a lumber business in Stevenson, Alabama. He has a Ph.D. in Creative Writing from Florida State University and an MBA from University of Virginia. He can be reached for comment at [email protected].
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