Reflections at the Beginning of Lent 2021

Pancakes and ashes. What do the two together have to do with the season of Lent? For me the peculiar, juxtaposition of the two in the liturgical year relates to the equally peculiar and powerful juxtaposition of feasting and fasting—and then feasting again—in Christian spiritual life.

Shrove Tuesday

Shrove Tuesday, also called Fat Tuesday, is the last day of carnival or Mardi Gras, a final day of celebration and feasting each year on the edge of the wilderness journey of fasting. During the Middle Ages, Christians “shrove” or sought absolution before the start of Lent. Shrove Tuesday was the last day of “Shrovetide.” Shrove Tuesday is known in some parts of the world today as Pancake Day. On Pancake Day, we eat our feast-fill because, as the Shrove Tuesday text from Ecclesiastes says—“for tomorrow we die.”

Ash Wednesday

Ash Wednesday marks the beginning of Lent. The origins of Ash Wednesday are rooted in the Jewish observance of Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement. Both Lent and Yom Kippur emphasize fasting and self and communal reflection. Christian worshippers today mark their foreheads with ashes to mark the start of Lent’s 40 days of fasting. Why ashes? In Scripture, ashes symbolize death (Genesis 18:27), judgment (Ezekiel 28:18), lament (Esther 4:3), and repentance (Jonah 3: 6). Ashes are also associated in the bible with fasting (Daniel 9:3 and Isaiah 58:5). Some burial liturgies include the phrase, “ashes to ashes, dust to dust,” spoken as dirt is sprinkled into the gravesite; both the ashes and the dust symbolize the finality of death. Both also symbolize life and growth. Fasting and feasting merge, it seems, as ashes and soil intermingle.

Feasting to fasting to feasting again is a liturgical arc encompassing the Lent/Easter seasons. In Eastern Christian traditions, Lent is called the Great Fast and Easter’s 50 days the Great Feast. During Lent, some traditions bury the Alleluia—we fast from this word of celebration—to enter into spiritual quiet—to let our spiritual soil rebuild for the springtime to come. But this work is not only symbolic or metaphorical spiritual work; it has to do with concrete realities of living in a world where too many people endure fasts that they did not choose. To choose to fast during Lent is a privilege for many of us.

I am struck each spring by the coalescence of Lent’s Great Fast and Easter’s Great Feast with the rhythms of an academic semester. The semester ends this year in the midst of Easter’s 50 days but before we arrive at the Feast we travel the uncertain roads of Lenten wildernesses. Also, Lent 2021 marks the anniversary of the start of pandemic social-distancing and quarantining in the U.S. To undertake this year’s Lenten journey, still battling the realities of Covid-19 and other crises, chaos, and injustices in our communities, all while studying theology and preparing for ministry is both challenging and enlivening. Both the academic and liturgical journeys invite us to consider again our work as religious leaders to bring to fruition Easter’s promises of abundant feasts for all people.

Plotting the Resurrection

Ε. Β. White, author of Charlotte’s Web, writes of his wife Katherine, an avid gardener, who every year in the fall, even in the fall of that year when she knew she likely would not live to see the spring, headed out to the garden to plant bulbs in her garden:

Armed with a diagram and a clipboard, Katharine would get into a shabby old Brooks raincoat much too long for her, put on a wool hat, pull on a pair of overshoes, and proceed to the director’s chair, a folding canvas thing…at the edge of the plot. There she would sit, hour after hour, in the wind and the weather, while Henry produced dozens of brown paper packages of new bulbs and a basketful of old ones, ready for the intricate interment.

As the years went by and age overtook her, there was something comical yet touching in her bedraggled appearance on this awesome occasion. . . her studied absorption in the implausible notion that there would be yet another spring, oblivious to the ending of her own days, which she knew perfectly well was near at hand, sitting there with her detailed chart under those dark skies in dying October, calmly plotting the resurrection.

from E. B. White, “Introduction” in K. S. White, Onward and Upward in the Garden.

So Lent begins. And despite all that is wrong in the world and our uncertainties about what the future holds, we yet again take up the radical Gospel work of plotting the resurrection.

Cosmologist Brian Swimme’s view of the place of humans in the cosmos strikes for me as valuable as we begin this Covid-19 Advent season.

An interviewer once asked Swimme about his vocation as a writer and teacher. 

“I am just so profoundly happy,” Swimme responded, “serving out the role of the human as the realm in which the Earth reflects upon and tastes its beauty.”

Advent is a liturgical season of anticipating and birthing. Advent is also a time for reflecting on what it means that God became human and dwelt upon the earth. During Advent we anticipate the many ways in which God arrives in our midst. We also celebrate how God dwells upon the earth in us and in the generous gifts of creation.

What does “Advent” bring to us during this perplexing and uncertain season?

To respond to this challenging question, I look to the importance of “place” in religious leadership and theological education:

Effective religious leaders are ministers in place: deeply engaged with the land, history, people and patterns of particular places. They are committed to the health and well-being of their locale and its inhabitants. Through the lens of the particular issues of a place, religious leaders are able to see more vividly the web of connections of the local context with a global environment and global economy.  Leadership in place is a practice, not a set of traits or qualities; leadership is worked out through direct, persistent, active engagement with the needs, hopes, and possibilities of a community.

Jill Crainshaw, in Grounding Education in the Environmental Humanities: Exploring Place-Based Pedagogies in the South (Routledge, 2018).

Poet Maxine Kumin’s insights about poetry and place come to mind:

In a poem, one can use the sense of place as an anchor for larger concerns, as a link between narrow details and global realities. Location is where we start from.

Maxine Kumin

Advent sings, prays, and proclaims the power and possibility of “place” in Christian understanding.

As we enter into Advent this year, I invite you to join me in considering this question: What if place—both its incarnational and resurrectional dimensions—is where theological education, religious leadership, and perhaps even faith begin and to where they return?

“Place” certainly seems to be where the liturgical year begins–with God making a place on earth through the birth of Jesus.

As this fall semester draws to a close, God’s liturgical incarnation rhythms have only just begun. The question with which I began the semester lingers for me and with it Swimme’s idea that the Universe—God’s good earth—somehow comes to taste itself, perhaps even to savor itself, through humans. This Advent and Christmas, as we rest between semesters, may we ponder anew the meaning of humanity’s place, and may we discover new ways to incarnate in our own lives and vocations God’s savoring and saving work.