Lent

I feel a little like I’m skipping Lent this year. I didn’t mean to. As a matter of fact, I selected a Lenten discipline, albeit a modest one, for the first time in years. I planned to read a Psalm every morning--with my children and husband on the days we are home together, and in the seclusion of my office on the days I head off to work before breakfast. We are on day 19 of Lent (day 16 if you don’t count Sundays) and I am on Psalm 6. Six out of 16 is only good if you’re calculating a batting average.

First, I had trouble keeping up with Lent because my kids were sick. Then, because I was. After that, we were in wash-all-the-laundry, scour-all-the-surfaces recovery mode. And then we were readying ourselves for a trip to visit my grandparents, one of whose health recently got much more fragile. We got back from our trip a few days ago, and I’ve been consumed each of those days with trying to find a way to wedge in a nap. I’m worn out.

None of these are excuses, not really. None of these things has so taken over my life that I couldn’t read a measly Psalm at some point during each day. They’ve just helped me do something I’m prone to do anyway: forget.

There’s a line in one of my favorite poems by one of my favorite poets that says, “When I forget my prayers, they will / bundle up and go out on their own / across the street, down into the basement, / into a small town with no mayor where / there is a single swing in the park.” I hope my prayers have been out without me, swinging in the park and meandering down the side streets. I have a hunch that this may be more than wishful thinking, in part because I think (I hope) we humans have prayer built into us: our heartbeats, our breathing, our sighing, our sleeping and dreaming. And in part because I think this is one of the great gifts of liturgy and the faith community: the liturgy and the community hold the seasons for us when we fail and forget. No matter how much I ignore and neglect Lent, I can’t ever really skip it because it doesn’t depend on me. It happens with or without me and somehow folds me ever back in.

And then there is this: I can't really skip Lent because Lent is really damn hard to skip. Lent, as a time of penance and self-denial, seems to barge its way into our lives invited or not, named or not. This winter has been brutal for pretty much everyone I know. We are sick. We are grieving. We are fearful and lonely. We are reeling from hurt after hurt, loss after loss. We are living Lent.

Psalm 6--my psalm of the day, delinquent though I may be--says, “Have mercy on me, Lord, because I’m frail. Heal me, Lord, because my bones are shaking in terror. My whole body is completely terrified! But you, Lord! How long will this last? Come back to me, Lord! Deliver me! Save me for the sake of your faithful love!”

And I hear our voices: My grandfather. My grandmother and mother and aunt who are caring for him through the long nights. My friend who is grieving the death of her husband, missing him so much it hurts to breathe. My friend who longs for a baby. My friend who longs for a break. My husband, who carries the losses and hurts of so many, bound up with his own. Everyone I know who has been sick several times too many this season, which is pretty much everyone I know. Even my children, whose small, sweet lives are already offering them tastes of the loss and death that are all around them.

And me. Have mercy on me, Lord, because I keep skipping Lent. Have mercy on me, Lord, because I can’t skip it even if I try.