Lent approaches.
And that’s wild by itself, since some part of me is still stuck in just-after-Christmas, when I launched into a month of being ill, and the fact of February seems like a joke. But the seasons turn in spite of me, and the season of fasting awaits.
Still, I’m not waiting until Lent this year to start.
Let me tell you what I did today, on this glorious Sabbath: I listened to the word of God. I came home. I had a wonderful lunch. I crocheted; I tended to some puttering I have been meaning to get to since before Christmas. I made an extravagant latte. At one point, I simply sat on the couch under a blanket and watched fat snowflakes drift down.
It was lovely. It was so ordinary. It was the best day I’ve had in two months.
I love Sundays. I love the Sabbath, the excuse to really dig into rest. And having been sick and unable to enjoy regular life, or taste my food, or breathe without coughing, I enjoyed it today even more than usual. Something I have learned about trials over the past several years is that they enrich the ordinary. Go through enough misery, and your ordinary morning coffee—uninterrupted, normal, unbothered—can feel like a revelation.
I think perhaps I have it backwards, in my description. It’s not that ordinary life becomes amazing after a trial. Perhaps it’s that the trial itself unveils the holiness of the ordinary moment. The wonder that suffuses the everyday. Perhaps in our daily life, unencumbered by suffering, we lose our ability to see it.
I thought to myself today, I haven’t done this in a long time.
Done what? Listened. Relaxed. Enjoyed something tiny, small, simple. Followed a whim. Let my mind leave concerns about work and work politics and tasks and chores and jobs and obligations. Let my heart feel unburdened by worries, concerns, and discomforts.
My phone gets in the way. My idolatry of my job gets in the way. My ego, my main-character-syndrome, gets in the way. But if I can shake those things off a little bit, just enough, I stumble into days like today: glorious free days where anything is as possible as nothing, and the presence of God somehow suffuses everything.
I don’t want to read too much into my New Year of Illness. Sometimes an infection is just an infection. Sometimes a trial is just a trial, and neither this man nor his parents sinned to cause it. But I am also uncomfortably aware that I staggered into the end of 2023 like a husk, with my fortitude, my spirit, my immune system and everything else at the lowest ebb imaginable. The crashing halt to the year, and the disastrous beginning to the new one, feels like a reminder that I ought to get my priorities straight.
And so—Lent. I’ll choose something to fast from, as I always do. The practice itself is meaningful. But also, today, I’m stepping back from a few things that get in the way of days like today. That keep me from finding the holy ordinary. That scrape me out and wear me down. That make it difficult for me to find moments where I might hear God’s voice.
I want to set up my life such that seeking God is always easier than harder. That finding time to pause and listen isn’t something I can rush by during the chaos of the day. That handing over my anxieties and fears becomes a discipline rather than a panicked moment-to-moment act.
Maybe then I’ll enter Lent with a different spirit, or a different outlook—not that the season will be an austere and limiting one, but instead as rich as it can possibly be.
Samaritan's Song 