Goals for Lent

When I say that I have a couple of goals to meet during Lent, you can rest assured that – sinner that I am – I will fail to meet them. But the point of this blog is to help me be accountable during Great Lent. The struggle is more important than the victory.

My first goal is a pared down version of one of my lifetime goals. I have a dream of being a decrepit old man, standing on the hillside of my coffee plantation/vineyard/brewery/zombie-impregnable-fortress, and greeting the sunrise by reciting the Psalter. But for now, Psalm 50 is a good place to start: "Have mercy upon me, O God, according to thy great mercy: according to the multitude of thy tender mercies blot out mine iniquity..." I pledge to pray this daily and to have it memorized before Pascha.

The second goal is harder. I have been thinking about the fast by reading the Prophet Isaiah, who wrote, "Is this not the fast that I choose...to share your bread with the hungry, and to bring the homeless poor into your house; when you see the naked to cover him, and not to hide yourself from your own flesh?" (Is. 58.6-7, RSV). The angel who spoke to the Pastor of Hermas said something similar: It's not a fast if I keep my excess. What is not spent on food must be shared with the poor. Like many families during Lent I drop my extra change into a money box that goes to a fund established by our archdiocese. Let me be brutally honest, the nice thing about doing things this way is that I don't actually have to be near the poor. I don't have to touch them or smell them or ask their names. I can simply send in my disembodied cash. Keeping poverty at a distance protects me from confronting my own year-round excess. It allows me to be comfortable in my middle-class lifestyle. Of course, this is wrong. So this year, along with dropping change into my little box, I'm going to take half of my weekly spending money and find a way to give it to a person with a face. There tend to be some homeless hanging around Vanderbilt. My goal, in all of this, is not simply to give money (which I know a lot of you probably think I shouldn't do, but I prefer not to presume that I know what is best for somebody else; I would rather give in faith and hope). I also want to give a little dignity.

My friend Doug introduced me to this concept a few years ago. When people stopped him and asked for money, he would stop and ask for their names. Sometimes he gave a little change. Sometimes he didn't have any change to give. But every time I've seen him do it I saw a little light appear in the eyes of the person he spoke to. Begging has to be humiliating. Sometimes it is good to remind the homeless that they have dignity, that they too are made in the image of God. Asking for a name is a good way to do that.

Last year my goal was to attend more services. My "record" is going to be a little lower this time around. It was easy to attend the Presanctified Liturgy when I could rock George to sleep, but right now he's at the age where as soon as he gets into church all he wants to do is knock over icons and play with the vigil lamps. So I will attend as many services as I can with him. (Stephanie and I may tag-team, who knows?) In the meantime, these two goals are a good place for me to begin to journey with Christ to Jerusalem.

Great Lent is about to Begin

If you are new to this blog, you should know that I use it as a public journal of my experiences during Great Lent. I do it because I am weak, and without some kind of public accountability I will find all sorts of reasons to be spiritually lazy.

Great Lent begins on March 2 (or March 1, depending on how you are keeping time). In Orthodoxy, if we are going to do anything, we are going to overdo it! So just as Great Lent prepares us for Pascha, a lot of what happens this month prepares us for Great Lent. This Sunday is the Sunday of the Publican and the Pharisee. Next week is the Sunday of the Prodigal Son. After that the Sunday of the Last Judgment. Are you seeing a theme here? The Church is helping us repent. We do not enter Lent by being sorry for our sins and simply begging forgiveness from them. Ash Wednesday is a beautiful thing, but there is no comparison to it in Orthodoxy. The stress, in our Church, is on repentance – metanoia – turning around and (like the prodigal son) heading in a different direction. Great Lent is a contest between us and our sinfulness. We struggle and pray so that, by God's grace, we might overcome them.

That is also why we fast. We do not fast so that God may see us, sitting in sackcloth and ashes, and have mercy on us (may God, indeed, have mercy on us!). We fast because, as Church fathers from St Gregory of Nyssa to St John Chrysostom to St Augustine have known, the desire to eat and the desire to sin are not fundamentally different. I am not saying that eating is sinning. I am saying that overcoming one kind of desire helps us overcome another kind of less-healthy desire (besides, let's be honest; most of us eat too much anyways). We have an appetite for sin just as we have an appetite for too much, or too fancy, food. When our stomachs grumble in church we ignore it, and pray a little louder. Likewise, when our habitual sins press themselves upon our souls, our reaction should be no different. We ignore them, and we pray a little louder.