Sometimes Lent Is Not a Slog
Some years, life is hard enough already. I think back to when I was serving in a large and busy parish while my wife was in decline. I would say that I was giving up church for Lent! That was not literally true (I was actually in church more than ever), but what was true was that I was not doing anything specifically for Lent, apart from church responsibilities. You may have been in similar seasons of life. It’s okay not to have a lenten discipline.
In such seasons, I found that I had figured out by the end of Lent what my discipline would be. Then I’d tell people what I was giving up for Easter.
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But other seasons, other years, it’s rather clear what one wants to do for Lent. My rector had “The Four S’s” that he gave up every year. He put them in a sermon once, telling us that they are sauce (meaning alcohol), seconds, salt ... and then he would pause. “The fourth one isn’t what you’re thinking.” Chuckles throughout the nave. “It’s sweets.”
I mentioned last week the fellow who gives up using the snooze function of his alarm. That’s unusual, and interesting, as is (which I also mentioned) giving up milk in your coffee. I think giving up seconds is also interesting. Lent is a time to learn to say: Enough. And if I could really eat more, it is possible for me to say, No thanks.
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In Perelandra, C. S. Lewis’s remarkable novel of the coming of life to Venus, the character Ransom is there from earth in the new Venusian paradise. It is a garden filled with beauties and delicious food. He takes a fruit, unlike anything he ever had on earth. He takes a bite, then eats it all, so wonderfully delicious. Automatically, he reached forth his hand to take another. But he realized, he was satisfied already. There would be something wrong with taking another. The fruit had been a gift to him, free, perfect, and the correct response was to be thankful, to let the experience be itself and not try to have an encore.
So, if this is a season in life when you have taken on a lenten discipline, give thanks for how a discipline can take us into the goodness of the world, teaching us not to grasp and cling but to enjoy. “It is meet and right!”
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Out & About. This Wednesday, March 6, I am rejoining the Lenten program at St. Matthew’s on Five Basic Christian Teachings that are important for our time. This week’s topic is God’s Word and God’s Spirit, which is to say, God’s involvement with the world. It’s chapter 3 of A Post-Covid Catechesis, if you want to read up in advance. You can come at 7 p.m. for the class, or at 6:30 for a light supper, or at 6 to join in the stations of the cross.
Sunday, March 10, I am to preach at St. Matthew’s in Dallas at 9 and 11:15 a.m. Then at 5 p.m. we will discuss the strangely popular recent novel, The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry by Rachel Joyce. We meet in the Great Hall for 90 minutes; everyone is welcome, and if you’ve read the book you are welcome also to talk.
On the Web. A delightful essay by John Steele Gordon is in the February New Criterion, “The Vagaries of English Spelling.” It opens with five words with five different pronunciations of “ough”: rough, through, though, bough, and cough. It includes a joke attributed to Mark Twain that fish should be spelled G-H-O-T-I; “gh” from tough, “o” from women, and “ti” from nation. There are reasons for English’s difficulties (and methinks some ambitious young scholar might mount a defense of Anglicanism in a sort of parallel to all this, but that goes beyond Gordon’s essay). Where do we get the idea that sentences should not end with prepositions? From Latin, which is much freer regarding word order than English but nonetheless forbids putting prepositions at the end. The 17th-century poet John Dryden is the source of the anti-final-preposition dictum. He was and is wrong: “English, which is not descended from Latin and which has very strict word-order rules, however, does end sentences with prepositions.” We pray, for old instance that I delight to note, that we may “do all such good works as thou hast prepared for us to walk in.” Enjoy: https://newcriterion.com/issues/2024/2/the-vagaries-of-english-spelling