Next week, the Christian calendar turns to Lent, a season of preparation for Holy Week and the celebration of Easter. Georgetown’s Campus Ministry typically marks the beginning of Lent with Ash Wednesday, including a service in the SCS inter-faith chapel, but the pandemic has challenged us to reimagine the distribution of ashes. One helpful way to journey this season together is by following along with Georgetown’s 2021 Lent devotional (sign up here), a daily reflection from a diverse group of students, staff, and faculty. The devotional is highly subscribed throughout the world and is a helpful way to appreciate the Christian significance of Lent.
But what exactly is Lent and how might this season offer important insights, not just for Christians, but for all people? How can the Lenten journey be translated in a way that resonates universally and appeals to our common humanity?
For Christians, Lent is the period between Ash Wednesday and Easter marked by prayer, fasting, and almsgiving. The period tracks Jesus’s journey from suffering and death to the new life of the resurrection on Easter. This period captures the core of the Christian mystery – healing and redemption of a broken world are made possible by a loving and merciful God who meets the world in its human condition.
More than just giving up things, like one’s favorite dessert or guilty pleasure, Lent is a time for inner transformation. Thomas Merton, a well-known contemplative Christian mystic, cautions against the temptation to treat Lent as an exercise in guilt:
“In laying upon us the light cross of ashes, the Church desires to take off our shoulder all other heavy burdens – the crushing load of worry and obsessive guilt, the dead weight of our self-love. We should not take upon ourselves a ‘burden’ of penance and stagger into Lent as if we were Atlas, carrying the whole world on his shoulders.”
Lent then invites Christians to be in touch with their individual and collective sorrows – the ways that we block the love and goodness of the Spirit in our own lives and in our lives as members of a community. There is both grief and healing in this purification process of acknowledging all of the ways that we have failed to love. Questions to inspire deeper self-reflection include:
- What holds me back from fully and freely loving myself, others?
- What in myself is in need of transformation and healing so that I can let go of my attachments in order to be of generous service to others?
- What is getting in the way of my truest and most authentic self?
- With a particular focus on persons marginalized by our social systems and structures, who do I ignore or avoid in the world? How do I contribute to the marginalizing?
- How am I being called to renew myself and my commitments?
So this Lent, wherever you are on your journey of life, I invite you to consider the possibilities that come with honestly and mercifully naming your faults in order to be transformed by them into greater love. In writing about Lent, Dorothy Day, founder of the Catholic Worker movement, offers that a generous and sacrificial love is a lifetime job and that this love is the only way to the kind of transformation of body and mind that Lent invites:
“Love and ever more love is the only solution to every problem that comes up. If we love each other enough, we will bear with each other’s faults and burdens. If we love enough, we are going to light that fire in the hearts of others. And it is love that will burn out the sins and hatreds that sadden us. It is love that will make us want to do great things for each other. No sacrifice and no suffering will then seem too much.”
For a virtual streaming Ash Wednesday service, please visit Georgetown University’s Facebook Page on Wednesday, February 17 at 7 pm.