A Lenten Reflection by Deonne Brady Morgan
Tuesday, February 27, 2024
My folks started a Baptist church (Salem Baptist, now Gracepoint, in New Brighton) along with three couples who were all affiliated with Bethel Seminary. We were new to Minnesota because my dad had taken a job at Honeywell. The year was 1961. The other families attended Elim Baptist in Mpls. Nordeast and wanted to expand to start a second church, which was considered mission work. We had just moved to Minnesota from Illinois for the first time (there would be two more moves back to Minnesota). I was four years old.
Baptists of this variety (BGC: Baptist General Conference) don’t do Lent. Lent was something the sinful folk not-real-Christians who attended the Lutheran church across the street did. I did not grow up with Lent. At some point I heard the word, but its concept remained a shushed mystery to me. By the time I was twelve I began to count the years until I no longer had to go through the motions of going to church five times a week. When I was 17 and had already attended 13 schools (we moved a lot, Dad kept getting promoted), I went away to college and that was the end of my Baptist church experience. I became a Buddhist for a decade, and then I did not ascribe to any religious tradition or spiritual practice.
Lent came into my life 35 years after the start of Salem Baptist Church, after a divorce, and finally finding a church home, albeit a Catholic one. I was 41 years old. St. Francis Cabrini (the “little Joan of Arc”), like St. Paul’s UCC, had been recommended to me by friends. It was an extremely liberal Roman Catholic church, the members of whom happily threw arms around this newly single mom of two young inter-racial children (four and nine). The other churches I’d tried showed me stiff over-the-shoulder stares and weren’t interested in visiting after service. I stayed with Cabrini and raised my kids in a Catholic church that celebrated women in the pulpit, practiced lay preaching, danced and drummed around High Holy Day bonfires, worked for peace and justice, taught Montessori Catechesis of the Good Shepherd to the wee ones (fast forward 15 more years and I bought my children’s teacher’s home where we still live, but that’s another story), and (sin of sins) drank from clay, not crystal, chalices and baked real bread for weekly Communion. I learned about Lent the Cabrini way.
Lent meant sifting sand through our fingers at the beginnings of Mass to remember Christ’s desert wanderings. It meant silently walking prayerful labyrinths in dark sanctuaries, and strolling the Stations of the Cross. Lent meant gathering in small family groups and apologizing to one another for things we wished we had or hadn’t done. Lent was the time the hallelujahs stopped. Lenten memories include the haunting sounds of candle lit Gregorian chants, trance-like singing of Saints recent and past (“.....pray for us”), Taize prayers. Remembering life’s most somber moments. Lent culminated on Maundy Thursday when we knelt and washed and oiled each others’ feet. But mostly, it was the time of waiting; the anticipation of the horror of the remembering of the crucifixion of an innocent man, followed by the joy of an ended life returned.
Lent for me was never the time I took something special, habitual, or wanted OUT of my life. It was not a time of denying myself something. I felt denied enough by life itself. Removing something else was too much of a burden to even consider. Life was hard enough for me, I thought, as it was. Getting through my life was an ongoing Lent of sorts. In a decade I had experienced: a failed marriage, the first loss of my home and of my children 50% of the time, the end of homemaking and volunteerism, Court-ordered full time paid employment outside the home, an assault on my innocent nine year old little girl, a son identified to have multiple neurological differences, clinical depression, breast cancer, six subsequent surgeries in 18 months, home foreclosure, bankruptcy. Four homes in ten years. I began to relate to Job. Yet I still had guilt that I couldn’t embrace Lent the way others did and deny myself something for a brief few weeks of time. The mere thought of doing so itself was too much to bear, let alone the practice of a period of more loss.
Life goes on and we cope, adapt, heal, bloom. Children do, too.
Fast forward.
In the past few years of my life, I have come to embrace a new Lenten concept, one that I think flips Lent on its head. God wants all things good for us, the Holy Creation. God wants for us to feel joy, to be happy, to know the calmness of contentment. God does not wish suffering upon us. Perhaps instead of taking something OUT of my life, could I ADD to my life? Where can I increase the positive places already in my life? Where can I grow in joy? Where can I love more, be kinder, be gentler to myself? To others? How can I feel more compassion for others? For myself? What can I do to lighten the load of the other? My own load? How can I more clearly know God’s desire for me alone? How can I draw closer to God?
Jesus of Nazareth was most likely the most selfless person who walked God’s earth. The Christ taught by example in giving. He walked his talk and fearlessly loved without boundaries. Maybe instead of “depriving” myself of something, which to me makes my world smaller, perhaps “expanding” my minute by minute world through stretching my comfort level out onto that unknown lonely limb, to give of myself and to myself in Christ-like manner for the betterment of whatever is itself a valid Lenten practice. It just may lead me further out of my own desert wilderness. It just may actually lead me closer to home.