Thought I’d give you some preparation time. Ash Wednesday is in one week and the forty days of Lent begin.
The Hubbell Pew started as a Lenten discipline fifteen years ago since I had for decades failed in my effort to give up oatmeal-raisin cookies for Lent. I used as my inspiration in the early days a few of the daily meditations of Frederick Buechner. Here is what he once said about Lent:
“In many cultures there is an ancient custom of giving a tenth of each year’s income to some holy use. For Christians, to observe the forty days of Lent is to do the same thing with roughly atenth of each year’s days. After being baptized by John in the river Jordan, Jesus went off alone into the wilderness, where he spent forty days asking himself the question what it meant to be Jesus. During Lent, Christians are supposed to ask one way or another what it means to be themselves.
If you had to bet everything you have on whether there is a God or whether there isn’t, which side would get your money and why?
When you look at your face in the mirror, what do you see in it that you most like and what do you see in it that you most deplore?
If you had only one last message to leave to the handful of people who are most important to you, what would it be in twenty-five words or less?
Of all the things you have done in your life, which is the one you would most like to undo? Which is the one that makes you happiest to remember?
Is there any person in the world or any cause that, if circumstances called for it, you would be willing to die for?
If this were the last day of your life, what would you do with it?
To hear yourself try to answer questions like these is to begin to hear something not only of who you are, but of both what you are becoming and what you are failing to become. It can be a pretty depressing business all in all, but if sackcloth and ashes are at the start of it, something like Easter may be at the end.
~Frederick Buechner published in Whistling in the Dark and later in Beyond Words.
However you address Lent it is time to prepare or as my old football coach use to say, “Time to put your game face on.”
Thx, Webb. Appreciate the reminder!!!
Enjoy doesn’t seem appropriate, but hope you have a fruitful Lent. All my best. Webb.