A Lenten Reflection by Sarah Green

March 14, 2023

For years, my friend Maggie and I have been wishing each other a “Happy Lent.” The spring we gave up sugar, the spring she was waiting for her first child to be born, the spring I went on antidepressants, the spring we tried the “add a practice” alternative to Lenten deprivation—each of these years it was the same: a text from her in Michigan to me in Minnesota, or vice versa: “Happy Lent!” with some kind of celebration emoji. This doesn’t on the surface make much sense; Lent is not liturgically earmarked to be a happy time. So why the delight in its arrival? I’ve been trying to think about that.

One thing I know is that we are both social people, both distractible, both eldest daughters, and both people who like to be helpful to the loved ones in our lives. Solitude, contemplation, unavailability… when you are wired to respond enthusiastically both to novelty in your environment and to requests for aid, these modes of being become buried under layers of doing, and stillness becomes something to get around to like the perpetual unfolded laundry we all have waiting on that one chair.

I was talking on the phone the other day to my friend Christie, who is an Episcopal priest. I told her that I was writing something about Lent for my church, and that I didn’t have a specific Lenten anecdote to talk about because to me, Lent isn’t a time in the past—it is always here. “That’s right,” she said. “It exists in liturgical time.”

Could it be that Lent is the steady thing, and I’m the intermittent visitor? Is Lent a state of being that we could access anytime but somehow do not? Do Maggie and I celebrate its return because in a way we are celebrating our own return—to rest, to intuition, to quiet, to permission to connect to unfinished grief, to questioning, to the selves we are outside of time?

I can hear readers thinking, what separates it then from just normal meditation—what’s particularly Christian about this practice? It’s a good question, and for me, the answer lies in the fact that my last five years or so of Lent have been notably marked by loss. Happy Lent?

One way to understand this salutation, maybe, is to consider the possibility that Lent is a time when Christians have the chance to try out the idea that God grieves with us— for the miscarriage and the divorce and the cancer diagnosis— and that God also waits with us: for the IVF to take, for the new love to arrive, for the cancer scan to clear.

In Lent, we—the beloved community— grieve and wait with each other, even as we offer one another a beautiful permission to be broken and to be alone in a way that modern society typically does not make room for. It’s a paradox, that solitude and that solidarity. It’s a gift, I think. Happy Lent.

-Sarah