Lent: Preparing for a Banquet

Not long ago, just as the season of Lent had got underway, a friend complained to me, “I know it’s Lent, but where’s the joy?” It is easy to understand why Lent is often misunderstood as a period of savage and destructive negativity. Doesn’t it encourage a despairing view of life “full of sound and fury”? It begins, after all, with Ash Wednesday and the grim reminder that we are dust and to dust we shall return. This is hardly the prelude to a party! Nevertheless, reminders of our mortality are salutary. Understood in the context of a life of faith, they prepare us for a celebration. Lent is about getting ready for a banquet, about preparing for a wild party.

While there can be a great deal of fun in a spur-of-the-moment party, the preparation for a great banquet takes a lot of time and effort. Getting ourselves ready for this particular wild celebration demands our being willing to be probed by hard questions about the meaning of our longing. This particular party requires that we bring with us, especially our passion and our need.

We live in an age when everything has to be palatable and easily digestible. Hard questions and tough decisions have to be reduced to the-consistency of cream of wheat. We have neither the stomach nor the teeth for solid food. Lent, however, is a time when real meat is served to feed the mind as well as the soul. There used to be a steak house in New York that displayed a sign: “If you find our steaks tough, then quit. We don’t want weaklings here!” Lent is a serious time and, if the moment is right, it can present us with life and death issues. It isn’t, however, meant to be a grim time. It is an opportunity for truth-telling, for our discovering the true grounds of joy and hope.