THE SEASON OF LENT:
COURAGE IN THE DARK

by Ray Waddle

It’s not the most festive moment in the church year: To file up to the altar railing and get a bit of ash pressed on the forehead by a minister, who then informs you, “Remember you are dust, and to dust you shall return.”

It’s a jarring thing to hear face to face. There’s no point debating or objecting or asking for clarification. Best just to return to your pew, a little dazed, and ponder this necessary news heard during Ash Wednesday services, which took place last month (March 5, 2003) in churches all over to mark the first day of Lent.

The season of Lent — shadowy, sacrificial, pensive, difficult, self-confrontational — sounds like a public relations nightmare for religion, at least by the prevailing standards of marketing. The Lenten message flies in the face of every expectation of public entertainment these days, including many a worship experience. It is not upbeat or user-friendly. It does not major in visual stimuli or celebrity appearances.

It opens wide the door on thoughts of disaster, death, regret, recovery, human guilt, no excuses, no one to blame but our own failures, no hope other than the startling news of Easter morning, which comes April 20 this year, just in time.

The 40 days of Lent started only a few weeks ago, but it feels like the world has been slogging on Lent’s rough road all year long. War talk, economic jitters, nuclear worries, more war talk, outrage, sorrow — the wide web of human weakness and tragedy leads to every doorstep. Even the recent mucky weather of late winter has had a sludgy Lenten texture to it. “You are dust, and to dust you shall return” — there’s nothing pretty about it, nowhere to hide or explain it away. At no other time in the calendar does this terse message of mortality escape into public view. Yet churches have seen fit to practice Lent’s disciplines and desolations for 1,700 years or so. They didn’t make up the “you are dust” part in a snit of pessimism. It’s taken from the Holy Book itself — namely, from the least cozy book in the Bible, the Book of Ecclesiastes.

It comes from Ecclesiastes’ epic third chapter. In that same chapter, the mysterious sage famously declares there’s a season for everything — “a time to be born, and a time to die . . . a time to kill, and a time to heal . . . a time to mourn and a time to dance . . . a time for war, and a time for peace.”

This very minute, bitterly divided, today’s warmakers and peacemakers are quoting Ecclesiastes’ list of perennial polarities with equal force and frustration.

What follows, though, is a passage about God and fragile humanity that everyone might rally around:

“He has made everything beautiful in its time; also he has put eternity into people’s mind, yet so that they cannot find out what God has done from the beginning to the end.” (3:11)

This says it all. It sums up the whole human project — the gorgeous dreams and ideals, the restlessness and disappointment. Carrying a ray of eternity in our earthly heads inspires saintly heroism and endurance, but an impatience and longing too. This is our mixed bag, our resume and shorthand definition — a capacity for divine transcendence, the hunger for it, yet the inability to know the mind and will of God.

Ecclesiastes gives finitude and death their place in the sun, even when the reasons for suffering are never clear, and countless bruised individuals have discovered a priceless consolation in his words. Ecclesiastes seems to bless the awful paradoxes of a lifetime, giving life’s rumble and jumble a sense of ceremony and solemnity like nowhere else.

So does Lent. It injects realism into religion, a sane reminder of mortal limits. It rounds out and dignifies the broad spectrum of spiritual emotions, including the darkened thoughts that any believer, any human, is bound to have, thoughts that go unspoken or uncredited in the market square of religious retail. Thoughts about the hiddenness of God. The unpredictable violence of bullets and cancer. Thoughts also of the destructive streak in humanity, the boastful waste, the funny way we get energized by war and danger and cruelty and are kind of bored by the practice of gentleness, patience and decency.

Lent, thank heaven, lasts only six weeks. This year’s Lenten season, ripening in the shadow of the dangerous geopolitical world, requires reaching down for a little extra courage, extra seriousness for pressing ahead with honesty in heartbreaking times. Soon enough, we’ll be emerging, as believers and as citizens, from the cave of soul-searching, amid the miracle of springtime earth renewal and a blinding Easter sunrise, and find out what we’ve learned, what we’re made of.

(Ray Waddle, formerly religion editor at The Tennessean, is a writer in Nashville. His book of meditations on the Psalms will be published by Upper Room Books early next year. He is at work on a book about Ecclesiastes.)