Lent: Winter meditations

Mardi Gras/Carnival is over. As are Shrove Tuesday pancake meals. Ash Wednesday is here and gone already and Lent is now in full swing.

As a kid reared Roman Catholic and an alum of their parochial elementary and high school system, Lent has been an important part of my upbringing. I hate to admit it, but almost all of those memories are negative. It’s hard to get into Lent, having been fed on images of Christ’s Passion and death, without feeling the guilt of a sinner who is part and parcel of the reason for the whole bloodletting in the first place. I grew up being taught that all Christ’s pain and suffering was my fault. Well, all our faults. We were weak, we sinned, and God had to take it upon Himself to come down and save us through the personal sacrifice of Jesus Himself.

Lent is Christianity’s annual six week period, beginning with Ash Wednesday, to meditate and reflect on our salvation and how indebted we are to the Son of Man for becoming one of us and, in due time, giving himself up to a Roman execution saved, during that time, for the very worst state criminals. How horrible for the God/man.

Lent, kind of like New Years, invites individuals to pick something to work on as a kind of meditative sacrifice. When I was a kid, we were encouraged to give up candy or a favorite television show for the duration. Sometime later, it became more vogue to do something positive for the six week event. Maybe go to daily mass, or pray/meditate on the gospel of Matthew. I’ve tried both, and like New Years resolutions, I’ve never done better than a mediocre job of living up to my own expectations.

Part of my problem is I truly hate violence. I drop in on Cindy’s television watching most evenings. Usually it’s Law & Order, NCIS, or CSI. Inevitably I walk through the living room when some corpse is being probed for evidence or some new cadaver is rolled out of the morgue locker in all its gruesome detail. Give me NASA tv, a Red’s baseball game, or Keith or Rachel on MSNBC any evening.

And that’s part of what bugs me about Lent. It ends in tears and tragedy every year. The God guy is going to be forsaken by his sinful friends and turned over unjustly to pay the ultimate price in a brutal and bloody execution. Dude, I try to avoid concentrating on such violence in my life. It’s very hard for me.

Maybe it is for everybody. Maybe that’s the point. All I know is it hurts me to the point where I just don’t want to participate. I could have gone to church for ashes yesterday, the tried-and-true reminder of our own death with the prayer offered over each believer, ‘You are dust, and to dust you shall return‘ as a cross of ashes is dusted on everybody’s forehead. At age 60 I know death pretty well. I just don’t want to dwell on it for six weeks. Every year.

I have signed up this year for a daily meditation provided by the national Episcopal church. It has greeted me on my email browser both days of Lent so far. They’re short and seem pretty thoughtful. Today’s entry focuses on the important work of Martin Luther’s reform, but ends with the reminder that ‘darkness is everywhere‘ in our world. I know. I just hate to obsess on it. I see humanity’s inhumanity to humanity every day just about every where I look in the news.

And it hurts my heart. I hate to face the possibility of being drawn into a maelstrom of meditation on death. Again. Still, it is winter and when Lent’s over it will be spring. We’ll be reborn again with life re-rising one more time from the Earth Mother. I’ll do some meditating -- and do my best to hang in. Both Spring and Easter offer one one heck of a promise.

Today’s elder idea: An original poem from last summer’s stay at the Nada Hermitage in Crestone, Colorado:

Nada 2

I recognize the need of suffering

in the world to balance

the joy.

Still

the brutality of the corpus nailed

to the cross repels me

from using the chapel for meditation.

I prefer contemplating the demise

of bugs in the bills of green-tailed towhees and

mountain bluebirds when it comes to

reflections on dark and light,

yin and yang, sacrifice and salvation,

consumption and release.