An Alternative Lent

I have never been a great fan of Lent.  I suppose it’s that I don’t have a very penitential sort of personality.  Actually, it’s not that I’m not penitent.  It’s just that I’m a terrible backslider.
 

The thing that has always bothered me a little bit about Lent is that the unspoken premise seems to be that God likes people to be unhappy.  That isn’t right, of course, but especially as a child, it sure seemed that way to me.  So, once a year, just to keep God satisfied, I had to give something up that I liked.  It was often chocolate.  Later on, I moved on to more sophisticated pleasures to go without during Lent.  It wasn’t the end of the world, but I did miss these things.  And it seemed sort of a pro forma exercise that didn’t really have much of a point.
 

Now this seemed odd to me since God had made those pleasurable things I was giving up in the first place.  And on top of that, what I was taught was that God wanted us to be happy and created material things for our enjoyment.  Why was it, I wondered, that for 40 days, once a year, we were all supposed to act as if that were not true, give up the good things God had made, and be unhappy?  It was better, too, if you could feel guilty.  I didn’t get it.
 

And then I came to understand Lent differently.  I came to understand it as being about health.  It wasn’t supposed to make me unhappy.  It was supposed to help me be healthy.  It is an alternative Lent.
 

And at that point I started thinking about Lent in a different way.  Instead of giving something up, particularly something I liked, I started taking something on that was healthy.  Giving up something was actually OK, as long as it was giving up something because it was unhealthy and not just because it was pleasurable.  So, Lent became about giving up what was not healthy or taking on what was.  Lent stopped being about misery and started being about healthy.
 

What I have taken on has been different in various years.  Some years it has been getting some rest.  Some years it has been overdue trips to the doctor.  This year it will be spending more time with my wife, who has finally completed the move to New York.
 

I’m taking the opportunity of Lent to begin our New York adventure.  We will be more intentional about time together.  We’re going to pick areas of the city to explore each weekend.  We are going to talk.  And walk.  And, Lent notwithstanding, have fun.  That seems to me to be much more what God has in mind with this annual opportunity of Lent.
 

Lent is now an annual opportunity to get me to do something good for myself.  Lent has stopped being about God punishing me for being human, which never did make much sense to me, and instead become a way of God helping me be healthier.  I like that a lot better.  I even look forward to it.
 

We are, in the words of the Prayer Book, invited to a “holy Lent.”  May it be a holy and healthy one this year.  That sounds a lot more like God to me.  And, perhaps, you may have the opportunity to discover what it is that really does make you happy.  And human.
 

Peace,
+Stacy

Archbishop and Missionary

There is an inherent tension in the life of the Church, and it is very much one in which we live today.  It is the tension of stability and change, of being settled and being a traveler, of safety and adventure.  It is this, the tension between safety and adventure, with which I am most concerned.  Ministry can, if one is not careful, be more about being stable and settled than about change, traveling, and adventure.  Mission is the counterbalance.  Being a missionary is inherently about change, traveling, and adventure.

I refer you to a medieval saint of the Church, Anskar, Archbishop of Hamburg and Missionary to Denmark and Sweden.  This tension between safety and adventure played out in Anskar’s life in an interesting way.  In the course of his ministry, in 845, the Danes sacked Hamburg, rendering Anskar’s nascent archdiocese unviable, thus leaving Anskar without a base and, more importantly, without revenue for his work.  Here is where it gets interesting.

In order to solve this problem, the king decided to combine the more prosperous district around Bremen with the now ransacked diocese of Hamburg.  It was a sensible solution except it did not make the Bishop of Cologne, whose diocese had included the wealthy town of Bremen up to that point, happy.  It was no small controversy in Anskar’s day, and it finally required the intervention of the Pope himself to resolve.  My guess is that the Bishop of Cologne got a cash settlement from someone.

Now, here’s my point.  Archbishop and missionary.  The reason they do not go together without tension is that one can be very much about vested interests and the other is always about upsetting vested interests.  Fundamentally, the missionary effort is about upsetting vested interests.  It is about upsetting vested interests in a distant place by the proclamation of the Gospel.  Even more importantly, it is about upsetting those vested interests within ourselves by living it.

The fact that vested interests resist the missionary imperative of the Gospel was not new in Anskar’s day, and it is not new in our own.  It has always been so.  But that being the case, we must not let it be the last word.  We must, like Anskar, be willing to, indeed insistent upon, upsetting the vested interests in the service of the Gospel.  Here is the difficulty.  The Gospel and the Church are not synonyms.  The Church is full of vested interests that prefer safety.  That’s the archbishop part of Anskar.  Not so the Gospel, which prefers adventure.  That’s the missionary part.  And it’s why salvation is in the Gospel, even more than it is in the Church.

 Peace,

+Stacy