We are just over the halfway mark in the 40 days of Lent, and so it seems about right that I feel lost in the dark right now. Things feel like … sludge.
Luckily I understand that now is the time to push. Not to quit. To keep going. Regardless of how it’s feeling.
Our feelings cannot be our motivations or we’ll never do anything challenging enough to really evolve in any important way.
(Talking to myself there because oy…)
So I keep doing the things: I keep reading the books and I keep filling out the journals.
In the meantime, as I struggle, the grass is greening and the lilacs have tiny, tight, purple bud clusters and baby leaves. The hyacinths in our front bed have tight buds also and you can tell their colors already.
Things are happening. The earth is awakening whether I am lost in the dark or not.
I will catch up. Eventually.
A moment of wakefulness
I was feeling all of this as extra heavy weight the other day, and I went outside to sit on the stoop and do some midday reading. It was quite warm and the sun was out.
People in just t-shirts were happily walking their dogs The birds were singing.
And when I tilted my face to the sun filled sky, I could feel the warmth in my bones. Something I crave all winter.
I started to read and felt that familiar, “What’s the damn point?” nagging at me from the part of me that too easily gives into despair and apathy. (The part of me that I wrote about over on Substack as my inner Frodo.)
From down the block, I could hear a bike coming and I could tell it was pulling something because it sounded so rickety.
I looked up as a man rode by. Things looked rough for him. And I just about burst into tears.
I went back to my book and immediately read this line:
“Bonaventure reminds us that the human person is the temple of God where the spirit dwells.”
And that just floored me: to read that just as that man rode past me… a man whom this ugly administration would gladly allow to disappear. A man this administration does not see any reason to help. (And so many like him or near to like him whom they see as undeserving.)
In the ugliness of evangelical Christianity, this man must be doing something wrong and his life is a sign of some sort of judgement. My feelings for his dignity, my conviction that he is as deserving of all good things as anyone else would be seen by them as “toxic empathy.”
Fuck that.
Our current culture is demented.
That man on that bike (and all humans who suffer or struggle) are the responsibility of all of us.
My point
To most of you, my point is obvious.
The work I’m doing for Lent is important because it is the necessary work of allowing our hearts to be broken by this broken world.
Because every time we allow that brokenness, the heart expands in its capacity to sit with and witness the pain of the world.
And one thing we need more of: People who can sit with the pain of others and not be overwhelmed by it or, like for too many, to be repulsed by it.