Repeating myself: What I like about Lent

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It’s good to be here again, isn’t it, at this time of the year, turning the liturgical calendar to a new season? I wrote this post last year and thought it might do, with my apologies for the repetition, to use it again.

Lent was not part of my experience growing up in a Mennonite church. It was something that “others” did (read: Catholics), and when one is young, what those others do often seems vastly inferior to what one’s own people do. We celebrated Good Friday and Easter and that was enough. Lent had an aura of gloominess and “works righteousness” about it, and we were beyond all that striving and uncertainty and climbing the stairs to heaven on our knees. (I speak as a child.)

But in the meanwhile, many Mennonite churches, including my own, adopted various practices of the liturgical calendar, and I’ve come to appreciate Lent’s invitation to reflection, to deep consideration of Christ and the cross, to give up or to take on. To see oneself as one is: as in the words of Thomas Merton, “I walk from region to region of my soul and I discover that I am a bombed city.” To hear oneself named “Beloved” in the midst of that desolation.

One can do this any time, of course, but Ash Wednesday with its formal beginning, and the six Sundays leading up to Easter with their liturgies and sermons and reminders are helps along the way.

So it’s a good time. But one of the things I like best about Lent is that it’s not a big deal in the wider culture. It’s not commercial. Having ashes imposed (I love that word for this ritual) to mark repentance and awareness of being “dust” seems by now, in fact, the strange activity of a strange minority.

Oh I know Mardi Gras is a big party and that many people participate in some form of Lent. I also know that Lent can take on a kind of trendiness. Just the other day I caught myself asking someone — casually, as if inquiring about the latest flavours at Starbucks — what they were giving up for Lent. As if it was any of my business. (It’s a fast, isn’t it?)

But mostly, Christians observe this odd season quietly, almost underground, like seeds swelling for the resurrection, while the real days get longer and winter turns to spring, while the “news” plays out in the world, while ordinary life continues. There are no cards to send or gifts to buy. No advertisements guilting us into spending, like at Christmas or the Hallmark holidays. No aisles of Lent toys or candies. No Lent carols playing in the malls. And nobody shouting “Happy Lent!”

Some women I love and honour

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It being International Women’s Day, I took some time to set down the names of women I love and honour, beginning with my mothers (mother and mother-in-law, actually, but I’m not going to get technical about that here, or in the rest of this either), my daughters, my grandmothers, my sisters, my aunts. The list could go on and on, to include nieces and friends and colleagues and women I admire from afar, whether by acquaintance or through their books or history… But today I’m thinking of these first circles in particular, and I name them below, with gratitude. (Daughters and mothers, being the closest circle, are the largest names.) Each one represents a relationship, a unique story, qualities I admire, challenges I’ve seen faced in strong and various ways, and wonderful gifts given to me and our family and the wider world.

Arrangement created at Wordle.

Feeling the fire

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Believe me, I’ve been tempted to jump into the internet heat around Rob Bell’s latest book — apparently on hell — but no, this isn’t about those flames. (And if you haven’t already had enough of that topic, let me tip to two pastors of my denomination who have thoughts on it, here and here, or you may want to follow the links and commentary at Brian McLaren’s blog.)

This is about Tongue Screws and Testimonies: Poems, Stories, and Essays Inspired by the Martyrs Mirror (edited by Kristen Eve Beachy), a book I’ve spent a good number of hours reading the past weeks, more hours in fact than I usually spend on a book, because I’m reviewing it for Rhubarb. So I’ve been reading slowly, and taking notes. It’s been, at times, a surreal experience, reading of burnings and drownings and the other torments of the martyrs, and all the while the house so quiet and the weather so cold these days, the snow still thick , the sun bright, yes, but shining with a serene beneficence rather than heat. How far it all seems from the noise of those long ago public spectacles, and the rising flames and the rising songs (except, of course, when the tongue screws prevented them), though I’ve been stirred just the same, as I often am by words, such a diversity of them, some pulling me close to the fire, to feel it, others pushing me away, to consider what to think of it all.

The book offers a whole variety of responses to the Martyrs Mirror and its effects, ranging between adulation and critical resistance. I’ve got to save the details for the review, which  so far, is just an awful draft. But one fact is clear enough: it was very costly back in the time of the Anabaptist martyrs, to speak or act against the grain of accepted ideologies. So great was the trauma, it spawned a kind of silence. Mennonites became “the quiet in the land.” (“we wrapped our silence/ around a kernel of fear. This fear fed us…” from a poem by Sheri Hostetler.)

Well good thing we don’t burn or drown folks for their new or contrary ideas, not here, not now. Then again, there’s more than one way to turn up the heat. So maybe the words of  “the woman with the screw in her mouth,” in the poem quoted above, will encourage anyone who risks speaking and living their convictions, including Rob Bell. Says she, “The dying / was worth it, every pain. We were chosen to bring something new / into the world….”