The “As I See It” column will appear in each Sheepskin edition and will offer a “guest cleric” point of view.
DeeDee emailed a few weeks ago to invite me to contribute an article for the next Sheepskin. She said The Sheepskin’s theme was to be “Lent.” My first reaction was WHAT?!? It feels like what we’ve been going through for the PAST YEAR has been Lent! Now we’re supposed to be enthusiastic about ANOTHER Lent? And think of it as something we look forward to? Really?
When I cooled my jets and began to ponder the subject of Lent, the first thing that I recognized was that my reaction … and maybe yours … was based on an unhelpful understanding of Lent. I remembered an old story about a little girl named Jenny attending church on Ash Wednesday with her mother. In those days, before the “new” Book of Common Prayer (1979), the Ash Wednesday service began immediately with Psalm 51. It’s full of language of breast-beating and lamentations about one’s sins and transgressions: “Wash me through and through from my wickedness” and “I have been wicked from my birth”, etc. On the way out of the service, Jenny peered up at her mother and said “I do bad things now and then, but I’m not THAT bad, am I Mommy?” (Fortunately, the 1979 Prayer Book sets a very different tone in its opening collect which begins: “Almighty and everlasting God, you hate nothing you have made …”). So what do we learn from this about how we might enter into our Lent this year?
We just completed the Good Shepherd Annual Meeting. Part of our discussion was about what we have experienced this “COVID” season at Good Shepherd. What had we learned, what surprised us? A major “Ah hah!” for me this year has been how I have appreciated the technology that has enhanced our community life in worship and the administration of the life of the parish. A bit of a curmudgeon about all things new and unusual - I’m an octogenarian after all - I’ve come to enjoy the ZOOM worship services and “coffee hours” and committee meetings. I’m also very much treasuring the weekly ZOOM conversations with my adult offspring in Philadelphia. There’s no way I would have said any such positive things about computer technology a year ago. It was something to be tolerated, at best.
The last Sunday in January was “Youth Sunday” with our Good Shepherd young people responsible for leading worship. This is always a blessing for the rest of us and we treasure the gifts they bring us on these special Sundays. The sermon that day was offered by Liv Hornsby who offered what I think is wise inspiration for the challenge about how to take up our practice of Lent this year. After telling a story about the struggles and insights of her teen years, she shared with us the blessings she had come to be grateful for from those experiences. And then she ended her sermon by asking us to contemplate: “what have we been blessed by in our own lives?”
So, like the gathered parish at our Annual Meeting, the guidance for our own Lent is in giving thanks for the unexpected blessings in our lives over the past year’s “Lent”. Doing so invites us this Lent to consider daily engaging in something like a “discipline” -- in the positive sense of that word. For example, every evening, we take time to consider Liv’s question: “what have I been blessed by today?” “Where has God been in my life today?” And to give thanks for that remarkable gift from a God who not only hates nothing he has made, but loves all of us so dearly.
THAT kind of Lent is something to look forward to.