On Lent.

I didn't learn much of anything about Lent until I was grown. Before that, I only heard the word a few times and all I knew of it was that it was somehow associated with Easter. I was born into the religious circle of General Baptists. General Baptists don't talk about Lent. General Baptists talk about believing in Jesus and getting your hands dirty; the school of love God and work hard. My heritage is a practical one, and the idea of sacrificing something for 40 days and giving extra care to prayer and penance was too complicated for my doctrinal forefathers. Baptists of all types, whether "General," "Primitive," "Independent," "Southern," "Missionary" or any other name you can imagine, are "the plain people." The only exposure I had as a child to all things liturgical, aside from the days of Christmas and Easter themselves, came through my father's father and the Methodist church. He was a United Methodist minister when I was growing up, and we would occasionally visit whichever United Methodist church he happened to be pastoring at the time. While in that religious sphere, I would sometimes hear words like "Lent" and "Ash Wednesday" and "Advent," but as my stay never lasted long, my understanding of such matters remained shallow.

I still am largely uneducated in Lenten matters (just last year, while I was still a student, I saw a girl walking around campus with a smudge on her forehead. I let my initial confusion pass, but after I saw another girl, I thought, "What is going on?" Only then did I remember it was Ash Wednesday.), but after learning what little I do know, I've found the tradition interesting, and I've thought about participating.

But my want of education, in both senses of the word, is at once my first and second hesitation. My first hesitation is that I feel I lack the knowledge to, in a sense, have the right to participate. I felt the same way about Communion (or the Lord's Supper, Eucharist, whichever is your term of choice) when I was a child. I have known about Jesus my whole life, and I gave that life to him when I was four years old, but I didn't understand the whole thing with the bread and wine (or juice in the cases of every church I've ever attended) at such an early age. I heard "Do this in remembrance of me" over and over again, and watched all kinds of people nibble either bread or crackers and drink tiny shots of grape juice from these nifty fluted cups, and felt like I should do it too, but I didn't get the context surrounding it or understand the depth of its meaning. So one Sunday morning, while walking with my aunt through the procession at the front of my grandpa's church, when my father's sister looked down at my short frame and offered me a piece of bread I shook my head from side to side. I didn't understand it, so I didn't want it. Even though I adore freshly baked bread and grape juice more than most other things on this planet.

My second hesitation is this: clearly, Lent is currently nothing more than an intellectual curiosity for me. The essence of my interest is contained in my desire to know, not in a desire to be affected by it. If all I want to do is pull it apart and examine it so that I can store knowledge and experience in my brain....is that the right posture to have when approaching Lent? I think I too often engage the world solely with my brain and not with my heart, and that detached intellectualism has a way of stripping beauty, truth, good things, of their meaning. In my zeal to learn about the flower, I pluck it from its roots, and pretty soon the life that attracted me to it is gone and I'm cradling a broken, dead, decaying configuration of atoms; not a flower. I don't want to kill Lent.

But maybe that's just how I roll and I need to embrace it. I think most of the time I need to see the flower die before I can appreciate what it means. Then, through the sacrifice of that one flower, I can go on to find other flowers and be fulfilled by only gazing at them and breathing in their scent, not tearing them apart with my fingers. Maybe I could jump into Lent with no more knowledge of it than I now have, and being around it, looking at it, hearing it, smelling it, would allow me to experience how meaningful it is. But more than likely, it wouldn't. More than likely, I'll have to make it die, to pull it apart into myriad facts, ideas, and theologies before I can find its essence, the essence that I have ripped away.

And for all my debating on both sides of the fence, maybe that's actually not such a bad way to operate. I seem to remember some guy saying that it's only in losing my life that I can find it.

As Lent is already upon us in Christendom this year, maybe this season can begin my education. And maybe before the next one rolls around, I will have thoroughly ravaged it enough to put it back together and finally have it mean something to me.