All Saints, Dorval
February 14, 2024
Are you ready for Lent? I’m not.
I feel like it was Christmas the day before yesterday, and we’ve barely had winter this year, and now here we are once again hearing about plagues of locusts and putting ashes on our foreheads while reading a gospel that explicitly tells us not to put ashes on our foreheads.
(Though I’m afraid that this year, the oil-to-ashes balance came out distinctly tilted in favour of oil. It was one of those “not enough, not enough, still not enough, OH CRAP” situations. Kleenex will be provided for those who need it to keep oily ashes from running into your eyes.)
But I digress. I was remarking on how Lent crept up on us this year.
Still, as Paul says, “See, now is the acceptable time; see, now is the day of salvation!” Ready or not, here Lent comes, and God will make any time, including the present, into the acceptable time, into the day of salvation.
The very name of the season, “Lent,” is embedded in the concept of time. Unlike many of our churchy words, it doesn’t come from Greek or Latin, but from the down-to-earth Anglo-Saxon: it’s simply a contraction of “lengthen”, because Lent begins as the days are lengthening toward the spring equinox.
(The French word, “Carême,” is likewise time-based, being a contraction of the Latin “Quadragesima,” referring to the forty days of this season.)
But the word “Lent” has all kinds of resonances entirely unrelated to its actual derivation.
My colleague Jean-Daniel O Donncada is one of those people who goes swimming when the air and the water are both 5 degrees, and when there’s actual ice on the river he goes to the local pool. A couple of days ago, he told this story on his ministry Facebook page:
This morning I was at the pool, and my brain was thinking, in English, about Lent. And each lane at the pool was labelled, in French. Rapide—fast, Moyen—medium, and Lent—slow.
Not to brag about my physical prowess, but given the demographic of my fellow suburban lap swimmers, I am never in the slow lane and usually ignore it without a thought. But it caught my eye because my brain was thinking of English Lent when I saw the little bright yellow sandwich boarding shouting in French, LENT.
But as my mind wandered up and down the pool—lap swimming is akin to lawnmowing as a meditative practice—I could not stop thinking about the idea of LENT meaning SLOW.
There are lots of directions you could go in with this connection. Certainly, in our fast-paced society, we are constantly hearing exhortations to slow down and live in the moment. If you can do that, more power to you! Parish priests in Lent tend to laugh hollowly at the idea as we stare down the gauntlet of things to do between now and Holy Week. And folks with jobs, kids, caregiving responsibilities, and any number of other commitments find that there’s only so much time that can be carved out of an over-full schedule.
Meanwhile, others whose activities are limited by age, illness, or disability find that “slow” is all too accurate as a watchword for the way time passes, and the last thing they need is more time for reflection.
Even if the days on the calendar are flying by, it can seem that God is slow to answer our prayers, and we are slow to respond to God’s love or to show signs of spiritual growth. But, as Jean-Daniel concludes his impromptu swimming pool meditation, the slow lane is
where you will find the people who—sometimes the oldest and youngest ones in the pool—have made a commitment to swim laps, who know most people are “better” at it than them, but are there anyway. The LENT lane is both for people trying to do something new and for those refusing to stop doing something they have long done.
Is time passing fast or slow for you, this Lent? Are there things in your life that frustrate you with their slowness? Are there places where you are longing to slow things down? Are you among those who are trying something new, or those refusing to stop doing something you have long done? And – perhaps most importantly – how does that feel?
“See, now is the acceptable time; see, now is the day of salvation!” Ready or not, here Lent comes, and whether fast or slow, God invites us into this journey.
The traditional Lenten practices are, of course, prayer, fasting, and almsgiving, another old-fashioned word that means “giving money to the needy”. And there’s another English word that has completely spurious resonance with Lent – the past tense of the verb to lend, as in, “I lent her fifty dollars.”
In days past, when the offering plate was lifted at the altar, the priest would say, “All things come of thee, O Lord,” and the congregation would respond, “And of thine own have we given thee.” Lent can be, among many other things, a reminder that everything we have is lent to us from God.
As we give to good causes, we remember that all our possessions are on loan from the one who created all things. As we fast – abstaining for a time from meat, sugar, alcohol, or other habits – we recall that our bodies were fearfully and wonderfully made by God. As we pray, we observe that our very minds and souls, and the ability to enter into conversation with our Creator, are gifts of the Holy Spirit. How can we give back to God that which was so generously lent?
Maybe you’ve been planning your Lenten discipline for weeks. Maybe you haven’t given it a thought until this very moment. As the days lengthen, and we count forty of them to Easter; as we try to slow down, or live into the slowness; as we contemplate giving back to God that which has been lent to us for a short or long time, Lent holds an infinity of ways to draw closer to God.
“See, now is the acceptable time; see, now is the day of salvation!” Ready or not, here Lent comes, and God will make any time, including the present, into the acceptable time, into the day of salvation.
Amen.
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