Lent for Everyday Life

Ash Wednesday and Lent haven't grown old, but they have lost their personal novelty. Having come from a tradition that was more perplexed than pious about people walking around with dirt of their foreheads, I came to Ash Wednesday a few years back for the first time at a retreat and have thus experienced it the last two years in my church community. But this year, while I'm excited about this season for our church life, I'm approaching Lent differently.

Maybe this perspective comes with growing in experiences and while I'm admittedly young, I'm beginning to realize that most of life with God is made up by the quotidian, everyday, common, boring stuff. And it's in the common, familiar, boring, and comforting places that God waits for us. It's also in our common, familiar, everyday routines where we grow casual, tired, and blind to how God plays in our living rooms, laughs over our experiences, graces our dinners, suffers in our pain, and plays house with us in brokenness. It's there in the boring, old parts of life God's Spirit is waiting to dance with us or just sit with us.

With the thought that God is in the boring routines of my life, this year I'm only adding a simple practice to Lent. Knowing that I have a penchant for novelty, the temptation for me is to only search for God in new and often temporary ways. It's a lot easier to find God in a stranger for some reason than the homeless man I see everyday waiting outside our church. It's easier to be hear God speak through a friend than it is to hear God speak through my wife. It's easier to worship with new music at a retreat than with familiar hymns with our church week in and week out. It's easier to find God in someone else's teenager or youth group than my own.

The reality is that God is there in our boring routines, we're just blinded by our familiarity.

So not only am I adding a simple practice, but I'm adding something I had given up since shedding my fundamentalist garb. Not only is this practice old and familiar, it is mixed with odd and uncertain feelings from a legalistic past. This year for Lent, I will be simply praying over my meals. That's it. And in this practice I hope to settle more into life as it presents itself through typical routines and find that God has been with me in all these places I've overlooked.

Lent Practice

Today is my first blog post in a long time. This is my Lent commitment, to write more. First my plan is to journal for myself 2-3 times a week. Second, I'm going to be posting here once a week. I find writing a good enterprise for myself. I can't say I love it. It takes a lot of work, especially when I know someone might read it. My brains doesn't work in such a way that I can just sit down and spew out my thoughts in order and have them make sense much less sound a bit better than elementary or grating to the learned reader. But I still enjoy the practice. I enjoy working through my thoughts, intentionally forcing myself to reflect and think through problems, and having a focused conversation.

Tonight, at a worship gathering among some of my community we'll be marked by Ashes. So I'm working on what I'll say tonight. Once that's done, I'll post that reflection. As I'm preparing my thoughts for tonight's Ash Wednesday service, I've discovered a community online talking about this season of Ash. I thought about tweeting each link, but I try my best not to utilize my social tools to annoy folks. So here's a link from Joan Chittester, a reflection on Ash Wed, one from an anglobaptist, another baptist,a reading list for Lent, thoughts from Tony Campolo, a great reflection from pastor Eugene Cho, giving up social networking, and a beautiful post from Sarah Miles.

Lent & Globalization

Lent is a refreshing time, refreshing in the sense that we are driven back, reminded, and disciplined toward that which gives us life: God. Traditionally, Christians practice a certain discipline that removes one activity, not because it is necessarily "bad," but because that activity or thing distracts us from the real source of abundant life. Fasting gives us time to feast, as WWJE (What Would Jesus Eat) reminds us here and here,

Lent always awakens my imagination. What can or do I need to fast from? What would be meaningful? What can I focus or feast on: prayer, Bible memorization, service? Much of my thought as of late as been on economics, consumerism, and globalization. Today I thought, "what would it look like to fast from globalization, and what would I feast on?"

In case your unsure what that -ization word means, here's Gerald Daly's definition that sums it up well: globalization "is characterized by the concentration of economic control in multinational firms and financial institutions, worldwide networks of production, exchange, communication and knowldge, transnational capital, and a freer flow of labor, goods, services, and information."

So, as I was pondering what it would look like to fast from the above, I thought...it's inescapable. I can't fast from globalization, it's not simply a personal choice but rather a national way of doing life. I could not buy any new consumer products and buy all my food local, but realistically this is not disengaging completely from globalization. All my past commodities, my car, the house I rent, the clothes I wear, the roads I drive on, the places I shop, the building I work in, everything has been produced my the grand narrative of globilization.

Driving this narrative is the myth of progress. With the crises of ecological disasters, global economic breakdown, exclusion of the poor, and the rise of conflicts because of resources we've seen that "progress" is unsustainable. Our markets, businesses, churches, communities, the "American Dream' is about sustaining the unsustainable all for the myth of progress.

As my Lenten reflection has lead me, the solution to globalized progress cannot simply leave behind the system, it's inescapable. Even my quest for a solution is driven by the narrative of progress..."what's next, how do we solve this problem?"

Maybe the recent economic meltdown is a reminder of how life actually works, not in progressive steps but in seasons, cyclical seasons of life and death, joy and pain, ups and downs. A civilization, a global village cannot exist on a story that does not embrace life through death, but rather does all that it can to ignore death, aging, and anything non-young.

My Lenten reflection leads me to think that solutions to globalization and a culture of progress cannot be as simple as "dumping" the system, but must provide real world answers in real world economics. This may mean compromising for the best possible solution at the time. Whatever it means, it means feasting on a God who invites us into seasons, Lent, Advent, Death, Resurrection. Truly the only way to live alternatively is to live within a different narrative, thus for Lent we should fast from progress and feast on reality.