The Season
First Sunday
As I walked through the wilderness of this world, I lighted on a
certain place . . .
(The Pilgrim's Progress)
Every Jan. 1 we hang a large calendar on the kitchen wall and begin to
write reminders in the daily squares--birthdays, vacations, committee
meetings, coffee duty. Slowly--actually, not all that slowly--the
squares fill with a thicket of notes. Appointments come and go; the year
turns. Then it is Dec. 31. We take the calendar down, heavy with memories,
and lay it aside until tax time.
The new calendar comes with some appointments preprinted--the Fourth
of July, Thanksgiving, Yom Kippur. Easter is there, in the spring, which
means that Lent comes now, in late winter. And when you look out the window,
there is Lent's image, its feel: you see the unbroken gray sky, the trees,
still gaunt, and you feel your need of Easter.
Of course, for our sisters and brothers in Santiago and Johannesburg,
Lent comes in late summer and Easter on the porch of fall. But the seasons'
turn is important however it comes, for it reminds us that our lives proceed
in circles. Lunch won't last you long; you'll be hungry again (thank goodness)
in a few hours. The encouragement you give a friend today will need to
be renewed tomorrow.
The same holds true for our spiritual lives. We don't move toward heaven
in one gigantic, decisive step after another. We move in small, repetitive,
cumulative patterns--learning to make a habit of what we do well, and
repenting, again and again, what we do badly.
Lent is for repentance. Repentance is a hard idea and a hard job. Yet
the calendars of our lives fill with the gray scribbling of our mistakes
and bad habits. We have been selfish when we should have been generous,
impatient when we should have been patient, cold when we should have been
warm.
Of course a believer's life has many moments of repentance. We may say
a general confession on Sunday, and this is important. But our sins get
so mixed up with the dailiness of our lives that they disappear from view.
It is good, healthy, to have a time when our job is to bring them to mind.
I have been a gardener all my adult life, in a small way (seasons again).
I spade, plant, mulch, weed, pick, peel, slice, and can the results--and
then I get tired of the whole business. I go out sometime in October,
pull up the gray, dilapidated plants, the ones with no life left in them,
and stand for a moment in the garden's emptiness and quiet.
Lent is the time to clean the garden--to pull up the old habits, the
ones with no life in them. We look forward to Easter, to new seed, the
fresh flower. But first, the cleaning up.
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