Lentil Soup Lenten Season

It’s Lent again. I’ve come to the same conclusions: I normally fail. This year I decided to get up for Morning Prayer at St. Paul’s. For two weeks I was going strong, and then I wouldn’t get up for Saturday or I would just sleep in this day. And then my room mate, who has given up her love of Diet Coke for Lent, asks, “What about morning prayer?”

Ohhhh, but it’s just so early. There are so many things that are good about it. I physically have to prepare in order to go: figure out when I’m taking showers because I am not getting up super early, get my homework done at a decent hour, make the decision to go to bed early. It’s not that much to sacrifice but it’s just different, it’s not what I’m normally used to.

And I even love getting up early, going outside and hearing the early morning birds as I walk to my car. Sitting at St. Paul’s and watching as the sun rises higher and shines light into the sanctuary. Starting off my day with the confession of sin. Starting off my day with communion and community and drinking coffee. Why the heck not?

But, I’ve failed again. Another Lenten season, another reminder that I continually need grace, that I always need discipline.

Kathleen Norris in her book, A Cloister Walk, describes the daily hearing of scripture in the Daily Office of Morning Prayer: “For a long time I had no idea why I was so attracted to the Benedictines, why I keep returning to their choirs. Now I believe it’s because of the hospitality so vast that it invites all present into communion with the text being read. I encounter there not a God who rejects me because I can’t pass some dogmatic litmus test but one who invites me to become part of a process, the continuing revelation of holy word. Heard aloud, the metaphors of scripture are roomy indeed; they allow me to relax, and listen, and roam. I take them in, to my “specific strength,” as Emily Dickinson put it in her poem “A Word made Flesh is seldom.” And I hope to give something back.” (217)

I’ve had a lot of conversation lately about individual experience of good and bad and how that shapes our notion of good and bad. For instance, I’ve experienced good and bad in the Catholic church and different Protestant denominations. Life is available in both places, but sometimes our views, or our families’ views, are shaped by our experience of ‘bad’ in one denomination and ‘good’ in another. Sometimes I wish we could set up booths of confession like Donald Miller talks about in Blue Like Jazz, except we would confess to each other as Christians, not to the outside world. I would apologize for the way you were hurt when a priest told you your marriage wasn’t legitimate, for the way the Vatican seems powerful and far away and not personable, for tradition offending your notion of God. And maybe someone could say “I’m sorry” about all the times I’ve been told that I’m going to hell because I’m Catholic, for the notion that the Holy Spirit isn’t present in the mass/structured forms of worship, for the belief that my infant baptism isn’t legitimate. Maybe then we could start to let some things go.

I know my experience lately has told me that the lectionary, the sacraments, and the daily offices of prayer are awesome. I translate that into all those things being preferable to other forms of worship, mostly because my experience in high school with the charismatic movement was not good. But that doesn’t mean that the charismatic movement is bad. In all things there are goods and bads. I hope to continue to transcend my experience—Lent is for reflection!