Posts Tagged ‘Lent’
breathe
Remember – the root word of humble and human is the same: humus: earth. We are dust. We are created; it is God who made us and not we ourselves.
Madeleine L’Engle, Walking on Water
As I inhaled and exhaled in concert with the Ashtanga Yoga poses I attempted, I felt it. Felt it toe-tip to scalp. Felt it in my bones and in my soul. It reminded me of the mist that fell on us and the Yountville appellation each morning we spent in Napa. It was a refreshing. A re-birthing. A glimpse of wholeness.
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I sat in front of the dark TV screen and a remote I hadn’t touched in over five weeks and I thought about this fresh and vital side of Easter. The other side of 40 days of fasting. Mostly, I thought about my pre-Lent attitude about fasting, an attitude that sounded something like this:
I’m already a disciplined person – moderate, temperate, restrained. I already spend so much of my life in fasting mode, sacrificing and giving up luxuries. Why should I have to give up any more of the few, small pleasures I afford myself on such a limited basis?
Can anyone say entitlement mentality?
So I was sitting on the couch, staring at the reflection of the sun in our darkened high-def boob tube, thinking about Lent and how surprised I was by this fast, surprised by how it had transformed and freed me from chains I didn’t know needed to be loosed.
You see, my TV-watching wasn’t excessive – at least not in the hours-spent-on-the-couch category. Nonetheless, I had still managed to abuse it, using the very sound of afternoon shows to keep me from feeling lonely as I work from home. The days can be long and, boy, that Ellen sure makes the silence not seem so loud from three-to-four o’clock. And then there’s Biography Channel at four o’clock. And the Game Show Network at five while I prep dinner. Oh, and then why not leave it on the music channel while Jason and I eat dinner. Then back into the living room to numb out in front of Nick at Nite or Food Network.
And there you go: the silence, the loneliness, cured. But something else had begun to die.
It was this dying that I became aware of once I began examining my heart in preparation for Lent. As I considered the number of things it would be good for me to say no to for a little while, it became clear that I had used TV (and so many other safe addictions) to fill a void, a void that I needed if I was ever to explore other deeper, more fulfilling things. I had used it to keep me from better places. Places Ellen and Rachael Ray and Chuck Woolery can never take me.
To good places where I make a phone call to a friend or relative. To contemplative places where I read a favorite chapter from a familiar book. To selfless places where I write a card to someone in need. To solitary places where I go for a walk. To quiet places where I take a nap and feel my baby kicking inside. To essential places where I talk with God. And listen. Listen to His Spirit. Listen to bird songs and rain drops outside my window. Listen to my life.
And in saying no to something that I was misusing (because of so much fear), in Lent I found myself saying yes to so much life and lightness and freedom. Refreshed relationships. Revived mind. Energized body. Reawakened soul.
With Resurrection Day come and gone, I may or may not turn the TV on to catch my 9:00 p.m. episode of Seinfeld every night. I can hardly believe it, but I just don’t need the noise anymore. Then again, even if I don’t need it, I’m thinking a few laughs at George Costanza’s expense are exactly the noise this celebration calls for.
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Wine is symbolic of a profound reverence for the God who made the earth and then called it good. ~ Rob Bell
I broke my Lenten fast today. It’s Rob Bell’s fault.
I was doing just fine on day 26 of this 40-day deal when Mr. Nooma came along, talking about wine. As he expounded on the fruit of the vine, I began to wonder if my fast had been a fruitless endeavor. Or maybe just a fruitful endeavor out of season.
You see, in these March days, as late winter winds succumb to intoxicating spring air, Jason and I are deep in the midst of exciting times. A season of arduous labor has given way to abiding freedom. Joy, celebration, and abundance has met us on the other side.
And here I’ve been living as if it’s time for refraining and abstaining.
I have a feeling if Jesus had been sitting with me as I listened to Rob today, He would have said the same thing He said to the Pharisees 2,000 years ago: “When you’re celebrating a wedding, you don’t skimp on the cake and wine. You feast. Later you may need to pull in your belt, but this isn’t the time. As long as the bride and groom are with you, you have a good time. When the groom is gone, the fasting can begin. No one throws cold water on a friendly bonfire. This is Kingdom Come!”*
It had seemed so right to cease in those early February days, to go without, to dig deep and give up. But when I open my eyes to the God-given feast surrounding Jason and me, it seems more appropriate, more freeing, more worshipful, to partake of the abundance.
So I broke it. And it has nothing to do with lack of control, insatiable cravings or unchecked indulgence. It is about enjoying God and every good thing He has rained down on us in these days where a warming sun and a steady shower brings winter-weary land back to life.
Tonight, as rain danced on our deck, spraying softly through the screen and inviting itself in, I toasted the bounty with my Old Vine Zin.
*Luke 5:29-35 MSG
2 Commentsa good idea
“I’m giving up wine for Lent,” I told Jason the other day. I said it so matter-of-factly that I almost convinced myself it was something I’d been planning since Epiphany. Truth is, I had only been thinking of it for about five minutes when I blurted my declaration.
“You sure?” he asked.
“Yeah. I’ve never done the Lent thing before. And wine just seems like, well, a good thing to give up.”
Now that I’ve thought about it, giving up one or two glasses of Cabernet each week hardly warrants a fast. Giving up chocolate or peppermint tea or goat cheese would be more appropriate, if sheer volume was the criteria.
But I had staked my claim with wine. It is one of my favorite things, after all. And it will be hard on those nights when my pasta and meat sauce or my homemade pizza sits before us in the shadow of a mid-February night.
“When is Lent anyway?” I asked Jason, already regretting this proclamation as I thought of our new favorite red table wine, Sacred Stone, and how well it goes with my garlic baked chicken and side salad drizzled in olive oil.
“I don’t know,” he replied.
“Well, whenever Mardi Gras is, it’s the next day,” I said, pulling up an imaginary calendar. “Hey, that’s this Wednesday.” I breathed in and sighed, determined to see my fast through to the victorious March 22nd end. Even if I didn’t know why.
But a few hours later, I got my reason. Jason and I were at Circuit City watching the first quarter of the Super Bowl (this is what you do when you don’t have cable). At one of the first commercial breaks, I caught a mediocre ad claiming this particular diet soft drink had fewer calories, even less sugar, and loads more caffeine. As zombie-like thirty-somethings came awake at drinking the soda, something about the stimulant-saturated beverage ticked me off.
“When is the pendulum gonna swing?” I asked. “When is it gonna end? This excess? I mean, how much more caffeine can we stand, really?”
Jason argued that it was already swinging the other way. But I didn’t believe him as I felt the hum and deep bass vibrations of thousands of soon-to-be obsolete electronic devices around me.
“When are we gonna just stop consuming so much? Just be content? Who needs all that caffeine,” I asked under my breath, suspecting that I had started sounding like a crotchety old man.
But then I became so involved in the game that I forgot about my consumption rant. I didn’t revisit it until our exit from the store.
“Oh, man, that’s out on DVD?” I thought as I looked at Becoming Jane and 3:10 to Yuma, bright and shiny in their cellophane wrappers on the shelf. “I want, I want!” In less than ten seconds, I picked no less than eight movies that would finally complete our collection of well-over a hundred DVDs.
Caffeine isn’t my drug. Neither is a 1080p resolution wide-screen high-def TV. Neither is wine. But I’m like everyone else when it comes to wanting stuff and wanting lots of it. And the awareness of that makes saying no to something, anything, even a little wine for forty days, seem a good idea.
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