The gift of Lent...

Lent arrives on Monday of this next week and probably not a moment too soon.

As a child growing up in the Plymouth Brethren we had no Lent and only a smattering of holy seasons, or rather holy days like Christmas and Easter. There were, as I remember, times of fasting and prayer where individuals or "assemblies" (what we called parishes) would practice this discipline but no set season as such.

In seminary the ancient flow of the church year, with its cycles of fasting and feasts, was a kind of flavoring added to the eclectic flow of self designed worship. Professors looking to add a dose of depth or flow or novelty to worship would occasionally take snippets of the ancient ordo and attempt to graft them on to whatever form of worship prevailed at the moment. I distinctly remember a class at the Church of the Brethren seminary across from Northern Baptist where we were tasked with designing a worship service and my group grabbed "Jubilate Deo" and stuck it in with a scripture reading and a few other things to make our "service". If I remember correctly it actually brought out a few tears in those who attended and looking back probably more in some of the Fathers. But we were at least trying to be sincere and for a few of us a taste of those ancient things pushed us to want more and were the first faint impulses of that which brought us to Orthodoxy.

And when one arrives in Orthodoxy there is a fascination with the rubrics of it all, the whys and hows, and what you're supposed to do and what should be left behind. Having been starved from the richness of all that so many who lived their whole lives in Orthodoxy take for granted the new arrivals often plunge in headfirst and with some passion. There's nothing wrong with that, I suppose, as long as people see that the rubrics and techniques and services are means and not the end in themselves. We don't fast in Lent just because we want to be in compliance with ancient canons. We fast because we have need of that which it brings us, repentance and a life drawn closer to God.

I need to fast because I have a need to be free from all that is dark and unholy in me, and believe me there's a lot. I need to fast because in a gluttonous culture I too have become a glutton. I need to fast because more often than I wish I have lost control of my appetites and need to bring them back into thier proper place. I need to fast because I sin and have made myself a captive and wish to be free.

At the heart of Lent, of all the seasons of the Church year, is that primal need, the need to be transformed from within and draw close to God. It's that need that keeps the bars open at night as people seek for a moment or two to be right with the world and know joy, or at least a bit of happiness, and perhaps find a person with whom they may connect. It's that need that keeps people at thier desks all day pursuing the money and things they feel will fulfill them. But the truth is that only God will do and in a strange twist of logic it is in the giving up of ourselves that we obtain what we need, and in the sacrificing of our desires that we are made whole. It was that need that made the Plymouth Brethren fast, we naive seminarians reach out for some fragment of a Tradition the rejection of which defined our denominations, and calls those who have traveled far to the safe shores of Orthodoxy to realize again the precious gift of Lent. Underneath the history and rubrics of it all is that hunger to be close to God, to be other than the person we see in the morning mirror, and we fortunate ones have been given a means to that end.

So I can't tell you how this fast, once started, will end. I may make a total mess of it. But I've got to try. Something deep inside of me needs to. Bright and early on Pure Monday the struggle begins.