A Little Bit of Lent

Last year, I told Patricia I was going to hit all of the Holy Week services, work and other conflicts be damned. And I pretty much kept true to my word, with the exception of the Saturday evening champagne and cake and Easter Sunday morning, when I was in Alford, Fla. helping my mother move. (I did make the Methodist Easter service in Alford, however, and ended up visiting with some of my great-grandmother’s old cronies, over a big spread of country breakfast, gravy, biscuits, piles of sausages and scrambled eggs).

Last year, however, I did not make Ash Wednesday. Indeed when I got there this year at 7 o’clock, the solemn service was sparsely attended. Everyone else may have been at the noon service, but if I am any indication of how people behave, I think that a lot of people miss the best and holiest services of the year.

You can get so much accomplished within yourself by attending just one Lenten service. On Ash Wednesday, for instance, I left St. Dunstan’s feeling cleansed, forgiven, prepared to begin a season of study and contemplation. Perhaps I shouldn’t have, but I felt renewed, that everything had been put into perspective—the more I get outside of myself, I came away thinking, the closer I become to God.

That night I grabbed my prayer book and took it to bed. “Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.” All of the wrong—self-indulgence, hypocrisy, envy, waste, love of stuff and dishonesty—for all of this, we asked forgiveness and received it. I lay there thinking, what a lovely feeling to feel forgiven, to be forgiven, like the glow you have when you wake up the first morning in your first house. It’s a kind of comfort, stability, warmth. Then of course you realize all of the things you have to do to keep that house—pay the mortgage, make repairs, clean, deal with sometimes whiny neighbors and taxes that are surely too high.

My new house/forgiveness feeling was immediately tested. On Thursday morning, it wasn’t 9:30 before I lost patience with a certain person I am wont to lose patience with and snapped. My boss came in, was probably irritable about something else, he snapped and instead of keeping my mouth shut, I snapped back, bigger, louder, with more bite. By the afternoon, I was picking up the phone giving some ad person what for. What for? For laying blame on someone else following an error. As a result of the call, I became the subject of a tattle-tale email with a bunch of people copied, just short of including the CEO. This is to say, I have a lot of repairs to make, many mortgages to go before I can call this new house mine. And maybe that’s one of the purposes of Lent. It is given to you and then maybe you have to work to actually deserve it.

So this morning, Sunday, Patricia referenced the line in the movie Broadcast News, about how we all know that murdering and philandering and stealing is wrong—that’s the obvious stuff--it’s the little compromises that change who we are until we no longer recognize ourselves.

The quote she gave: “What do you think the devil is going to look like? Come on, nobody is going to be taken in by a guy with a long, red, pointy tail. He will be attractive, he will be nice and helpful, he will get a job where he influences a great God-fearing nation, he will never do an evil thing, he will never deliberately hurt a single living creature. He will just bit by little bit lower our standards wherever they are important. Just a tiny little bit; just a tiny little bit.”

It was the part of the sermon that found its way to Sunday School, still vibrating in our minds as we listened to Tim talk about the first three Stations of the Cross.

So how does this apply to missing the Holy Season? I’m not sure but it feels connected. Maybe it’s like dancing around the edges of faith but then missing the most important part—because we aren’t bombarded by T.V. commercials, or ads, or big parties with eggnog and roaring fires and festive sweaters decorated with snow men and Santas. Maybe it’s because Lent is a season that begins when life is stripped bare from the earth. Like Caroline Miller wrote in Lamb in his Bosom, unlike a summer night when you are comforted by the sounds of creatures, a winter night leaves you lying there still and alone, the darkness marked only by the howling of the wind.

I’ll share one more thing—though this entry is getting long—it’s something I wrote after the Maundy Thursday service last year. It was never completely developed. I’m not sure that there was more to say, except that this year, I’m going to get a pedicure and wear shoes that I can easily slip off for the service.

I was telling my therapist that I had attended a foot-washing service during Holy Week. I told him how the service had moved me to tears. What I did not tell him was that in addition to crying, that when I reached my car in the parking lot at St. Dunstan’s, I began to sob. I could not put in words, dare not put in words the overwhelming feeling of closeness I felt to, well, God. But it was more than that. Watching my fellow parishioners quietly walk up to the altar and take turns pouring water from an earthen pot over each other’s feet, drying each other’s feet with a towel stunned, I was literally, not intellectually but literally stunned by the perfect example of humility.

I am basically a chicken. I sort of purposefully wore tights to the service so as to prevent any washing or being washed on my part. I had not had a pedicure and besides, the idea of foot-washing struck me as a strange and charismatic Baptist thing to do, something more akin to snake handling and public shows of salvation, fainting, laying on of hands, speaking in tongues.

“I didn’t actually wash anybody’s feet,” I said, lest I be accused of religious fervor. “Nor did I have my feet washed,” I told the therapist, who is Italian Catholic. The lights in his office are always soft and dim and the décor runs heavily to Buddhist gods and goddesses, glass and wood bookcases packed with volumes and volumes of psychiatric titles.

“The Christians got the foot-washing from the Jews,” he said neutrally, as he does most things.