Making Space

Until a few years ago, I had no concept of Ash Wednesday and my only understanding of Lent was "fish on Fridays." I observed, with evangelical skepticism, the Hispanic girls on my volleyball team in high school who couldn't join in the post-game hamburger on the way home from Friday night matches. It wasn't until I was a mother that I became aware of a longing to give my children a deeper, more rooted understanding of the centrality of Christ in life . . . as Life. Although I didn't grow up in a liturgical church, I began to discover the riches of the Christian calendar and a rhythm of life and faith that grows from living accordingly.

Over the past few years, we've adopted several Lenten practices including fasting that we have grown to love and cherish as desirable and necessary avenues for growing deeper in our faith and closer to Christ. Our fasts, both individual and familial, have varied, and we've failed to keep them perfectly. However, even in the failing, we've discovered so much about ourselves and our need for Christ's atonement on the Cross.

This past week we attended an Ash Wednesday service for the first time and were so blessed by it. In the homily, the priest shared the origin of Lent and gave a brief overview of why we fast. He described the act of fasting as sacrificing to create space for relationship with God. When we fast, we open up room in our lives for God by taking the focus off ourselves. Eileen Button describes the transformation in this way:

". . . the practice of Lent can be a valuable discipline. It's difficult to grasp what our sense of entitlement does to our bodies and souls. Our culture worships at the feet of pleasure. As we 'shovel it in,' we can become desensitized to our needs--the real hungers in our lives. Observing Lent can help us wrestle with the causes of our perpetual consumption . . . Lent invites us to jump off the hamster wheel of consumption and experience the pinch of abstaining from thoughtless indulgence."

These past few weeks, even before Lent, I was painfully aware of my propensity to self-medicate. As I began meeting with a small group to deal with some painful issues from my past, I could feel almost an instinctive need to avoid the pain at any cost. While my desire and the point of the small group is to take the pain to the Cross, I consistently tried to bury the pain in old habits. As I became aware of this pattern, I'd cut out that indulgence only to replace it with another. Apparently, I have a hierarchy of pain-numbing mechanisms--if food doesn't work, then TV will; if TV fails, there's always shopping . . . and on and on it goes. Of course, the irony is that none of these things satisfies; they only create more pain.

This year I see it more than ever--my need to create space through sacrifice, to trade in self-medicating for true satisfaction. It means feeling more than a "pinch" of pain; it means dying--dying to self. It means sitting with questions, and pain, and unfulfilled desires. This is a truly terrifying place to be, or at least it would be, if I were in it alone. Could there be a better time to walk through a difficult situation than Lent--when we watch our Lord walk willingly through horrific physical pain, not to mention the spiritual and emotional agony of complete separation from His heavenly Father, and death? All this, so that the empty space in us can be filled with the one relationship in which we can be truly satisfied. My prayer this Lenten season is to unmask the wide open space of my soul that's been hidden (at least from me) by self-medicating and to see God, who emptied Himself on the cross, become my only satisfaction.

If you've never considered practicing Lent, here's an excellent article from an Evangelical perspective on why we may be missing out.