Lent

I've never been a big fan of the season of Lent. I've disliked it so long, I'm not even sure what started me off. Among other things:

• I don't like how self-righteous people treat Ash Wednesday in the New Orleans area. They act like it's the final victory bell in the fight between "holier-than-thou" and "bound-for-hell". I'm a New Orleanian who believe that the dancing, generosity, and tolerance of Mardi Gras is a really good model for the Kingdom of Heaven, and I don't like it to be just "cut off" at midnight on Wednesday.
  
  
• A man my father knew used to give up alcohol for lent. However, since wine is drunk in the Bible, he'd down two or three glasses at lunch every day. Lent seems to me to be a time for hypocrites to thrive.
  
  
• In my experience, Joy is a precious commodity. I don't think it wise for Christians to stop praying for it, looking for it, waiting for it, and working for it for 40 days out of 365. And it seems to me that the usual way of treating Lent by religious Christians is a time to turn away from Joy and focus on despair.
  
  
• There's probably more, but I'm just writing off the cuff here...
  

I think it's time we took Lent back from the long-faced, intolerant and self-righteous. I don't know how it's going to happen, but the Christian calendar is full of festivals and holidays snatched from other religious groups.

One step forward in this struggle would be to come up with better, modern, Biblical and historically informed ways of seeing the season between Mardi Gras and Easter. Here are a few I've found recently:

• Ash Wednesday doesn't kill Carnival. It scatters it. All those folks who crowd Canal Street and Bourbon Street and St. Charles Avenue are going back to New York and Cleveland and Paris and Hong Kong, and their taking the party with them. They'll tell their friends, pass out doubloons and trinkets, laugh and party like... well, like a little Carnival. Ash Wednesday makes Mardi Gras not just a New Orleans thing, but a WORLD thing.
  
  
• Lent is about repentance, and repentance means turning back from our path and turning toward God. Lent should be a time of mission and joy, kindness and love, because that is what walking toward God means. Lent should be a celebration of how wonderful it is to be called by God toward Easter. The "meatless Fridays" that many of my Roman Catholic friends still observe were originally intended to encourage Christians to use the money they would be spending on meat for that one day to help feed the poor. Lent should be about getting beyond ourselves, and thereby finding ourselves.
  
  
• Lent is about humility. We tend to make idols out of ourselves. We tend to imagine that the good in our life is because WE are so good, and the bad is because SOMEONE ELSE is not being fair. We tend to think that people in trouble are in trouble because it's THEIR fault. Lent is a time to turn away from all that, and discover that God's will for humanity is humility.
  
  
• Lent is about darkness. It's something like a long Halloween, and if you know me, you know I love Halloween. Lent is about being able to walk in the darkness, especially walk WITH each other in the darkness. Lent is about being able to face the darkness because we know of the light.
  
  Christians have a bad habit of trivializing suffering, telling people who feel hopeless and desperate to just sing a couple of songs, say a couple of prayers, and watch as the world turns into butterflies and unicorns. They don't see that someone might not WANT butterflies and unicorns, that someone might think that having their pain ripped from them by some prayer would be a violent act, that someone might be trying to look death in the face, and resent those who claim to have conquered death telling them to just stop worrying and have some Bundt cake.
  
  Lent could be a time to reach out to them, to walk into their darkness with them, and to get them through it, not just out of it.
  

What do you say? Maybe we can change the world 40 days at a time.