When we fast we are not to become dismal. Fasting is a
spiritual practice that people use to become new.
When we fast we are not to become dismal. Fasting is a
spiritual practice that people use to become new.
But what if you wanted to become new and didn’t know how? What if you were sick of yourself, your house, your clothes, and your car, but you were too old to take off for the West Coast in a jalopy? What if you had heard just one too many stories about the crash of currency in Indonesia and couldn’t stand to worry about your own problems any more? But you didn’t stop worrying about your own problems. What if a new part of you was struggling to be born, but you felt wrapped tightly in shrink wrap, like a sandwich that stayed on the shelf too long, waiting to be chosen.
Lent
If any of these things describe you, then you are ready for Lent. You are ready for forty days in the wilderness. You are ready to put your life picture in a new frame. You are ready to fast — to be really hungry for something new.
The writer Tillie Olson spoke of her life needing margin. It had run into the walls of her frame. Artists and photographers insist that the empty space around an object defines it as much as the colored-in part. Lent is the rearrangement of the space in which we live. It is a look at context, at the air, at the nothing that is ours.
Try this exercise: Think about yourself as a still life. Put yourself in a favorite chair or window seat or grassy knoll. Paint yourself in. Use detail. Did you bring a purse? Or a basket? Or a book? Is your cat with you? How do you size up? Is the current frame appropriate? Or has it lost its paint? Are the nails coming out on the corners? Is it dirty? Dusty? Does it still interest you at all? How about the margins? Do they fit the picture?
Jon Spayde, the writing instructor, says that a “good story lets in the little goblins.” Let the devil into your picture. What does the devil want?
Then read again the story of Jesus’ Temptation in the Wilderness in Matthew 4:1-11. Write a story about yourself. You have been sent to a desert for forty days. What happens to you? What three temptations come your way? Write them down. Keep the little goblins close by during Lent. Make their acquaintance. Get to know them by name. Are there angels with you also? Give them names also. Let them accompany you and your temptations.
The God of dry and lonely times, the God of powerful quiet company, the one who knows the hard times and the soft times, the good and the bad, will draw near. The more quiet we can become, the more God will be near.
We do not have to be noticed by others to find God. We do not have to become vain or ridiculous on behalf of a large and grandiose spirituality. Like Jesus, we may be faithful to our daily life, just as we may be faithful to the days of our living.
Long Walk
Hypocrites make a “big thing” out of their Lenten reframing. They show off. They brag. And they become dismal in their bragging. Authentic Christians go quietly towards God — and are never disappointed.
In Slavomir Rawicz’s book, The Long Walk, a Polish nobleman ends up in the wrong place at the wrong time. Stalin’s army picks him up in 1944 and marches him and 3,000 other unfortunates across Siberia to a prison camp. Their labor is abused to mine the riches of the Siberian world.
They are forced into humiliation and quiet. They have no choice. On their way into Siberia, the men are chained to each other. Aboriginal Russians, riding reindeer, stop by their line. They whisper in their ears the news that their forbears have seen these marches before. Thus they are commanded to set out flint and food on their doorsteps, should the men ever desire to escape. The flint is made of dung; they teach the men how to make the fire out of dung.
Other crucial messages of hope come to the men in the line. A German, who has been keeping track of the days, sings Christmas carols on Christmas eve. The other men kill him: they don’t want to hear the music. Many die on the route in to the camp.
Five men, including the nobleman, escape. They do what the short men on the reindeer tell them to do. They pick up the flint. They then march through two winters and eighteen months to their freedom in India. When the three survivors arrive, after a hellishly long walk, which involves one adventure after another, our narrator goes mad. Their story is recorded by the odd circumstance of their having seen the “snowman” of the north.
Researchers tracking the snowman get the story out of the Polish nobleman. But they could never tell the whole story of the long, quiet prayer, of the desperation of the quiet prayer, or of the way showing off could no longer matter to any of them!
Our search for a reframed life is not nearly as desperate as the journey of these heroic men. But it can be just as real. We who hunger and thirst for new life only need imitate their quiet certainty that they will get home. God is with us. Our God who sees in secret sees us all.
Excerpted from The Culture of Disbelief: Gospel Sermons for Lent/Easter – Cycle B by Donna E. Schaper © 1999 CSS Publishing Company (www.csspub.com).
Donna Schaper is the Senior Minister of Judson Memorial Church in NYC. She and her husband Warren live in NYC.
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