The spiritual life is often described as a journey. It’s not the destination, we say, but the journey. But journeys have beginnings, too. We start from somewhere. And every pause we take along the path defines a new starting place: maybe still on the right track or maybe having wandered far afield. The season of Lent in the Christian tradition is about making a clear confession of where we are before we take a further step.
Last Wednesday was “Ash Wednesday.” Not a memorial to the recent devastating fires in Los Angeles, but the Christian holiday that marks the beginning of Lent.
Lent is a season in the Christian liturgical calendar that covers the forty days leading to Easter. Lent, by the way, is an old English word that simply means “spring”. The season of spring.
The date for Easter changes every year, so the date of Ash Wednesday and Lent also changes every year.
Easter Sunday is the first Sunday after the first full moon that follows the first day of Spring, which is March 20 this year. The earliest possible date for Easter is March 22. This year, Easter falls on April 20, coming very close to the latest possible date for Easter, which is April 25. And the late date for Easter also means Ash Wednesday came late this year.
The day before Ash Wednesday is Mardi Gras, which means “fat Tuesday” in French. Traditionally, Lent is observed by eating no meat, so the Tuesday before Ash Wednesday is the last day you can eat fat until Easter. But Mardi Gras is celebrated not just with feasting but as a general day of excess and frivolity: the last chance to get it all out of your system before we get down to the serious spiritual business of Lent.
There is an exception, though, to the privations of Lent. If you’ve been doing the math in your head you might be thinking now, “Well, wait, Rev. Rick, from Ash Wednesday, March 5 to Easter Sunday, April 20 there are 46 days, not 40 days.” And you’re right. As I approach my retirement in June, I’ve gotten pretty good about counting days.
That’s because Sundays don’t count. Lent is only Monday through Saturday. Every Sunday is a feast day where the Lent restrictions don’t count. So Lent is six, six-day weeks, plus 4 more days so it starts on a Wednesday.
Why forty? Well forty is a special number in the Bible. You might think of the forty days and forty nights that Noah and the animals spent in the Ark, according to one of the two Bible versions of the flood story. Or you might think of the 40 days that Jesus spent in the wilderness following his Baptism by John. We just read that story in the Bible class I’m teaching on Wednesday evenings.
So forty days is considered to be the appropriate and sufficient time needed to prepare for a big change in life: the new world that Noah would create when he and the animals stepped down to the dry land, or the ministry that Jesus was about to begin.
Lent for Christians is a forty-day journey to the new life that comes at Easter. We approach a resurrection, a new beginning, a chance to start again. From where we are, a life that has become troubled, or tired, or gotten off track, we travel to something new. Lent is both about traveling that distance, and, preparing ourselves to receive the gift that Easter promises when we arrive.
The model for Lent preceding Easter, comes from the Jewish High Holy Days. The ten days between Rosh Hashanah, which is a celebration, like Mardi Gras, and Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, when we confess our sins, ask for forgiveness, and hope to be written into the book of life, again, for another year.
Ramadan, in the Islamic tradition, is also modeled on the Jewish High Holy Days. Ramadan is a month of fasting, like the fasting of Yom Kippur and Lent. A month of spiritual cleansing and renewal.
For Christians, it’s forty days of Lent. Forty days of connecting to our mortality. Forty days of acknowledging how dependent we are on the gifts we receive from beyond ourselves. Forty days of wrestling with the uncomfortable truths about ourselves, confessing our sins, reconnecting with the ideals we hope for ourselves. Depending on how you see it, Lent is either doing the work of building the new world we want for ourselves, or making ourselves worthy of accepting the gift of the new world offered to us, when we arrive at Easter.
So Lent is a journey, a serious undertaking, somber work. With the goal, symbolized by Easter, of new creation, refashioning ourselves, making a change. As the earth changes around us, from dark winter to bright spring, from cold, gray days to the warm air and bright colors of blooms. As the animals emerge from their burrows, the seedlings emerge from the earth, we, too, leave behind what we were and journey to what we may become.
We often say, in the spiritual life, that it’s about the journey, not the destination. It’s on the way that we learn and grow. It’s the experience of the journey that changes us. We arrive at the goal already changed, because we changed along the way. The destination is merely the end point, just the celebration of what we’ve already accomplished in order to get there.
That’s not entirely true. At least not about every journey.
If you’ve ever been on a long hike, certainly you want to enjoy the experience throughout the hike, but you also want to get somewhere. The high point, or the vista, or the waterfall, you finally come to, not only gives direction for the hike, but also adds its own extra pleasure beyond the sights along the way. It wouldn’t be a satisfying hike if every step was a desolate slog, until only at the very end did you turn a corner and see something beautiful. But neither would it be much fun if the hike itself were beautiful, but the end point was just same random marker telling you to stop.
In the spiritual life, as in all life, we want to get somewhere. And we want the getting there to be fulfilling, too. A goal that’s worth our while, and a journey that’s worth our while, too. Because, when you think about it, every intermediate step along the path is also a destination. And the destination, too, is just an intermediate step along a longer path.
But what we don’t get, in this advice about remembering that the spiritual path is about the journey not the destination, is any mention of the other part of every journey: the beginning.
Journey’s start from somewhere. That’s why we dedicate children in the Unitarian Universalist faith. And that the reason for Lent, as well.
Lent begins with Ash Wednesday. The ashes are meant to remind us of our mortality. We are creatures of the earth, and to the earth we will return. “Ashes to ashes, dust to dust.”
That phrase is from the funeral service in the Book of Common Prayer of the Anglican Church. It’s not in the Bible. But many similar phrases do appear in the Bible.
From Genesis, just after Adam and Eve are expelled from Eden: “By the sweat of your brow you will eat your food until you return to the ground, since from it you were taken; for dust you are and to dust you will return” (Genesis 3:19).
Again, in Genesis, when Abraham bargains with God to spare his nephew Lot and his family from the destruction of Sodom, Abraham says, “Now that I have been so bold as to speak to the Lord, though I am nothing but dust and ashes” (Genesis 18:27)
And this, from Psalm 103: “As a father has compassion on his children, so the Lord has compassion on those who fear him; for he knows how we are formed, he remembers that we are dust. The life of mortals is like grass, they flourish like a flower of the field; the wind blows over it and it is gone, and its place remembers it no more” (Ps 103:13-16).
On Monday, I returned from spending a week in North Carolina with my father. My father, who is 92, had been living alone in the home he shared with my mother until my mother died three years ago.
He had been doing OK by himself, assisted by a neighbor who checked in on him every day, and a cleaning lady who came once a week, and a home health aide who came every other week. My dad has always been well connected to community in his church, and to his Kiwanis club, and to other connections he and mom had made in their small rural town of Waynesville, North Carolina, over the nearly four decades since they moved there. It was comforting for my three brothers and I to know that dad was so well looked after because none of the four of us live close to him.
But two weeks ago, dad had an incident where he had gotten up in the middle of the night to use the bathroom. He had some difficulty and fell. He didn’t break anything, but he doesn’t have the strength to get himself up from the floor. He pushed his Life Alert button, but it didn’t work. He had left his cell phone on the table by the bed. So, unable to help himself, he sat on the bathroom floor from 1 AM until 9 AM when the cleaning lady arrived. She called an ambulance and the EMT took dad to the hospital.
My brothers and I heard about the incident. My sister-in-law and my eldest brother flew out to assess the situation and they realized that dad just wasn’t up to the job of living alone any more. After some convincing, my father accepted the reality. They identified an appropriate place for dad to live, where he could get the help he needs. My youngest brother came out to offer support with the move.
And then two weeks ago, after they had returned home, I flew out.
Dad, I’m happy to say, is doing remarkably well. He’s eating better. His hygiene is better. He has a call button he can use 24/7 if he needs help. He’s always been a social person, so he enjoys having other people around. And of course, his friends can still visit, and take him out to lunch, or take him to church.
And dad is also accepting of reality. One quality I’ve always admired about my parents, and probably learned from them, is they see and say the truth and make the best of circumstances without complaining. Dad recognizes his limits. He knows what he can and can’t do. He acknowledges what the years have taken from him. He observed more than once while I was there, without sadness, that the room he is in now would be the last place for him, the place he will die. Not soon, he always quickly added, but eventually.
I observed that everybody has a last place they will live. That’s being mortal.
Ash Wednesday is meant to remind us of this universal truth: that we live within the context of dying. Not soon, we hope. But eventually.
I flew home on Monday, two days before Ash Wednesday. But on the Sunday before, I went with dad to his Methodist church. While we met before the service with his adult Sunday School class, we could see out the window of the classroom, in the courtyard, the pastor of the church with a group of high school kids burning the palm fronds from last year’s Palm Sunday service to make the ashes that would be smeared on the foreheads of the faithful during the Ash Wednesday ritual. Ashes to ashes.
I also spent my week in North Carolina, clearing out the house that mom and dad had lived in and engaging a contractor to do some renovations and a property manager to rent it out. With help, again, from dad’s connections to the church and his Kiwanis club, I was able to give away everything to local charities: clothes, pots and pans, furniture; and to cart to the dump the items that the charities wouldn’t take: old mattresses and the miscellaneous odds and ends of four decades.
But I went through everything carefully, and I set aside keepsake items for myself and each of my three brothers and a cousin who was close to my mom and dad. One box of keepsakes, more or less for each of us. A photo album. A handmade quilt. A tie clip that had belonged to my grandfather. The baby book my grandmother had filled out for my mother when my mother was a baby.
I showed all of these to my father, so he would know what I had saved. And then I went to the UPS store and shipped them off.
That is where the journey of Lent begins. You have to start from somewhere. You have to know where you are in order to get the right directions to where you want to be.
Because if you’re not honest about where you are, then your journey will be fruitless and meandering. You’ll wander purposelessly. No matter how well you define your goal, if you can’t say where you are, then there’s no way to tell whether the goal is to your right, or your left, or straight ahead.
I have to start from me: the real me. You have to start from you. Our mortality is one truth about where we are that everyone shares, and which is the particular spiritual focus of Lent, but other truths about who we are are also important to well define our starting point before we begin a journey of spiritual growth and learning.
Are you honest? Are you generous? Do you manufacture drama because the chaos gives you a little thrill? How patient are you really? How willing are you, really, to help a friend, or a stranger? How much time do you spend online? What’s the truth about your diet and exercise? Start from where you actually are. Many wonderful qualities, sure, but some growing edges, too, right? Are you OK with the amount you drink, or smoke, or the debt you owe on your credit card? Measured against the cardinal virtues of Prudence, Justice, Fortitude, and Temperance, we spoke about a few weeks ago, where do you stand on the map of your life?
And from there, but only if you’re willing to locate yourself truthfully, you can then begin to plot a route to the goal you seek.
In our Call to Worship this morning, Kathleen McTigue gave us this advice for a journey about to begin, and good advice for every step along the path, too, because every step on the way is also it’s own starting point for the rest of the journey.
We come together this morning to remind one another
To rest for a moment on the forming edge of our lives,
To resist the headlong tumble into the next moment,
Until we claim for ourselves awareness and gratitude,
Taking the time to look into one another’s faces
and see there communion: the reflection of our own eyes.
Open your eyes. Claim awareness. Where are you, truly, on your life’s journey? With the seniors in the Sunday school class looking out at the burning of the palm fronds as they turn to ash? Or the pastor, at mid-life, leading the exercise? Or the teenagers, uncomfortably struggling to relate to a truth that seems so distant from their own reality? You have this one life. If you aren’t where you want to be you can start today to walk there, but only if you first admit where you are.
The forty days are in front of you. And you can give yourself a break on Sundays. You have this Spring, once again. Forty days for introspection, self-examination. To confess your sins. To reaffirm the ideals that have slipped away. To return to the holy path you may have strayed from. To reach and win the new life you seek.
We sang:
From all the fret and fever of the day,
let there be moments when we turn away,
and, deaf to all confusing outer din,
intently listen for the voice within.
In quietness and solitude we find
the soundless wisdom of the deeper mind;
with clear harmonious purpose let us then
bring richer meaning to the world again.