Lent is Done

And if you're trying to sing an old song, 
you're getting all the words wrong,
Well, you're just a-following along too closely in the book.
—"Epistemology," M. Ward

A few weeks ago, at the start of Lent, I wrote some thoughts on what it is and what it can be. I also wondered openly what meaning I would take from Lent this year, and someone suggested that I write about it after the season was finished.

I come from a church background with little to no emphasis on the season of Lent, or on most seasons of the Christian calendar. Thus, I have little instruction in how I should find meaning in the season. (It occurs to me that this might make me feel more free to find my own meaning in something, but in my experience, a lack of restrictions on what one can do is not the same thing as freedom.)

I gave up eating any animal products during Lent this year. I hoped to practice this self-denial as an avenue to reflection and contemplation, and to use fasting from certain foods as a way of making myself pure for the season of Easter, a time of renewal. I think that, most of the time, I failed in the former goal. I rarely stopped to think why I was not eating something, what was this abstention supposed to be pointing me towards. But there were occasions, perhaps once a week, maybe twice, when I would pause and reflect: in eating simply, I prepare myself for Jesus' death and resurrection; in denying myself, I remind myself of Jesus' sacrifice for me and for the world. These thoughts, though simple, are of deep importance to me.

I tend to be disappointed in myself at the ends of these kinds of things; I often feel that I have failed to really follow through with or take seriously such religious activity, especially activity spread over such a long period as forty days. I worry especially that I have not achieved the insight that I was supposed to. As I get older, though, I'm beginning to see things differently: the purpose of sustained religious activity, particularly for adults, is not necessarily to teach something new, but rather to remind us of the important lessons we would otherwise forget. (I talked more in depth about this perspective last week.) So, for once, I am content with my Lenten experience. I hope to continue to be so in the years to come.

Good Friday

Lord, why castest thou off my soul?             why hidest thou thy face from me? I am afflicted and ready to die from my youth up:             while I suffer thy terrors I am distracted. Thy fierce wrath goeth over me;             thy terrors have cut me off. They came round about me daily like water;             they compassed me about together. Lover and friend hast thou put far from me,             and mine acquaintance into darkness.

       —Psalm 88:14-18, KJV 

It's Good Friday, the day on which the Church remembers the crucifixion and death of Jesus.  Last night at church, we had a service which ended with a ritual I've always found to be particularly moving. While the above psalm is sung by a single voice, rising over the drone of low notes hummed by the choir, members of the congregation strip the sanctuary of all its ornamentation and implements. The communion cup and dish are covered and taken away; the altar and podium lose their colored cloth. At the end, there is only a crucifix in front of the congregation, covered by a black shroud.

The lights are turned off. The congregation sings a final, quiet song, unaccompanied by any instrument, and all leave in silence.

***

What are rituals for? I grew up thinking that to make something into a ritual meant, fundamentally, to take away its meaning. I thought that the only way to really mean something—a prayer, for example—that it needed to be spontaneous and made up on the spot, or at least created by the person who says it. How can you really mean something someone else created and handed to you and said "Here, say this and mean it"?

I recognize now that this was pretty short-sighted. I didn't think, for example, that songs written by other people were worthless if I sang them, or that marriages were invalid unless the person performing the ceremony made up the words as she went along. I just thought, really, that church rituals, doing and saying things about/for/to God "by rote" (as I would have put it) was wrong, and that was that. 

I've since changed my opinion about these things, but I haven't spent much time thinking about why. In a book I read recently called Religion for Atheists*, the author takes rituals, in particular religious rituals, to be a way of reinforcing what we already know, or what we already ought to know but would otherwise forget. They are a way of getting around our tendency to forget things very, very easily. He points out that at universities we are expected to absorb information heard once, often from someone not particularly interested in getting us to really know or understand what she is saying.  Religions, though, teach us the important lessons continually, through ritual reading of texts, saying of prayers, and the like. They are a way of making sure that we don't forget the most important lessons. 

The trouble with relying on ritual alone to teach us things is that we often end up not acting on what we know is good, e.g.: I know that it is good to love my neighbor, but I often fail to. This state is called akrasia, Greek for something like "acting against one's better judgement." We need something to startle us into paying attention to what we have heard and said a hundred times in church or elsewhere, something to break us out of our akrasia. One such thing, the author suggests, is beauty. 

***

I chose the King James translation in the psalm at the beginning of this entry, because I think it is beautiful. In fact, if you believe Robert Alter, the King James version is the last Bible translation both to set out with "beauty" as an end goal and to succeed. Bible translations tend to aim for accuracy and especially clarity and readability, but they tend to sacrifice style, rhythm, and other elements that make a written work truly enjoyable to read. 

Having read about the KJV and its goodness, I recently set about reading it myself. In my imagination, it's an intimidating book, full of old language and hard-to-parse phrases. But when you really sit down with it, and get yourself in the proper frame of mind, Robert Alter's argument comes true: it's a beautiful translation. And if Religion for Atheists is right, it may be the best way to startle myself into living rightly. I'm going to stick with it, I think.

***

Postscript: two things I think the ritual at the beginning of this post should remind us of. 

• Remember and respect that we are mortal. We all die, and that is no light thing.
• Sometimes we feel alone and abandoned. We should reflect on that feeling and remember it when encountering others: they may feel it without our knowing.

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*Why am I reading a book with a title like Religion for Atheists, you ask? I thought, in the day and age of the New Atheism, when atheists have embarked on a project of making religion out to be a downright monstrous thing, that it would be nice to read a book where an atheist talked about why religion was valuable and good. And I was right. It was very nice. Also, a character in one of my favorite books, Gilead, talks about the beauty of water baptism by quoting an atheist, Feuerbach, and I always thought that was neat and wanted to do it, and now I can, but without quoting Feuerbach, who is German and (in the German way) very hard to read.

Lent This Year

We go forth on the path eternal, and as condemned,
with downcast faces, present ourselves before the only God eternal.
Where then is comeliness? Where then is wealth?
Where then is the glory of this world?
There shall none of these things aid us, but only to say oft the psalm:
Alleluia! Alleluia! Alleluia!
—"Funeral Ikos," John Tavener*

As of Wednesday, it is Lent for the Western churches. This year, I am joining a group of friends in adopting the Eastern Orthodox Church’s Lenten fast.

Let’s back up slightly. What is Lent? I’m from a church background that does not observe the Christian calendar very thoroughly; we pay attention to special days like Christmas, Easter, and Pentecost, but there tends to be little emphasis on the seasons of the year that lead up to those things, the times of preparation for those special days. That is to say: I am probably not the best person to ask about what Lent is. Because Lent is one of those times of preparation.

Lent, to my understanding, is the season when Christians are called to consider and prepare for the death and the Resurrection of Christ, a pair of events commemorated on Good Friday and Easter, respectively. In order to prepare ourselves, we are called to reflect on the meaning of those events in our daily lives, and we do so for the 40 days before Easter. In order to remind ourselves to reflect, we practice self-denial, usually of food like meat (traditional) or chocolate (one popular choice among many). The idea, I think, is that if you are regularly forced to avoid doing something that you normally do all the time, the sudden jolt of unfamiliarity (Whoa, I can’t eat meat today! etc.) will stop your routine mental process and allow you to consider Christ and His sacrifice for the world, and for you.

But Lent, for many people, is something besides that. For me, it has often, I dare say usually, been a simple test of the will. Can I beat a 40-day challenge? Can I really give up something I like a lot (usually soda or meat) and still be happy? I think a lot of folks treat Lent in primarily this way: a contest with themselves. There’s also a certain showmanship or attention-seeking that goes on: people share what they’re giving up with each other and are often proud of it, and this social element becomes a reason to “do Lent” in itself. I also have treated Lent in this way.

So Lent is many things to many people. In fact, in its function as a test of will with external boundaries, it’s at least moderately popular among non-Christians—I know several who are giving up something this year. It’s sometimes tempting to cast disparagement on those who use it for purposes other than its original Christian liturgical purpose of self-preparation and reflection, but I won’t, because I’m not blogging to disparage people. Plus, Jesus said this:

Do not judge so that you will not be judged. For in the way you judge, you will be judged; and by your standard of measure, it will be measured to you.

And far be it from me to ignore His advice on this or any matter.

***

Let’s return to the Eastern Orthodox Lenten fast. First, what is it?
To my understanding, the traditional fast in the Eastern Orthodox church is a fast from meat, animal products, and olive oil. I haven’t figured out why just olive oil, but there you go. There are also portions of Lent at which one, if one is able, fasts from food entirely for as much as several days at a time. The idea behind the fast, in addition to creating an avenue to reflection, is to literally clean out one’s body, to eat the simplest, healthiest fare and become purer physically thereby, in readiness to meet with Christ after the Resurrection. Again, though, I am no expert in these matters.

So, then, why are my friends doing this, and why am I?
A number of my friends have been exposed to Eastern Orthodox practice over the last few years in a couple ways. First, a large number of us have actually been to Eastern Europe on missions trips to places like Russia, Moldova, and Georgia. Those of us who have gone have gotten to see in person a different way of practicing our own faith, to experience the beauty and strangeness of it. One friend actually converted to Eastern Orthodox Christianity on this side of the water, so we’ve had cause to consider its practices and rituals through our contact with him.

In being exposed in these ways to the practices of another part of the Church, we see what is missing in our own part. We grew up without things like mandatory fasts, or even things like communion or baptism. Ours is a church without many rituals or sacramental practices. We make a few key outward signs of our faith, but we do not commemorate the most important time of the Christian year with anything particularly special. The specialness, the set-apartness of this time, Lent, for other churches is moving and attractive to us. So we seek to make it our own.

I wonder if the adoption of another church’s practice is a mark of insecurity about our own church, or of dissatisfaction with the way in which our church functions. Perhaps growing up without much in the way of ritual in our faith has made us long for the comforts and beauty and access to meaning that ritual provides. I know that it has made me long for them, sometimes.

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*Note: this music is one of the only pieces of music from the Orthodox tradition that I know of. It is also very, very beautiful. The rest of the lyrics are here.