- Feb 5, 2002
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COMMENTARY: I love Lent, but some people don’t, and sometimes I don’t either.
“I hate Lent,” people who grew up Christian have said to me. Some described Ash Wednesday as the worst day of the Church year. They often said it angrily, as if they were reacting to an insult or a slander, or to abuse.
That shocked me when, in my early 20s, I was a new Episcopalian discovering the Church year for the first time. I liked the fact that the year included several weeks in which you worked at seeing the truth about yourself and your need for God’s grace. The whole thing was really cool and here were people with a lot more experience of Lent than I had telling me they hated it.
I’d grown up in the complacent optimism of secular modern American liberalism. It was a world of high ideals, and ideals not to be scoffed at, beliefs about what people and society could and should be. As the sociologist Zygmunt Bauman said, “The good society is the one that knows it is not good enough.” (Something that should be true of the Church as well.)
That way of seeing the world contrasted with the people who said that what we had was the best we could ever manage or (worse) said it was so good we shouldn’t try to change it. The fact that the people who said this were comfortable did not escape me.
Continued below.
www.ncregister.com
“I hate Lent,” people who grew up Christian have said to me. Some described Ash Wednesday as the worst day of the Church year. They often said it angrily, as if they were reacting to an insult or a slander, or to abuse.
That shocked me when, in my early 20s, I was a new Episcopalian discovering the Church year for the first time. I liked the fact that the year included several weeks in which you worked at seeing the truth about yourself and your need for God’s grace. The whole thing was really cool and here were people with a lot more experience of Lent than I had telling me they hated it.
I’d grown up in the complacent optimism of secular modern American liberalism. It was a world of high ideals, and ideals not to be scoffed at, beliefs about what people and society could and should be. As the sociologist Zygmunt Bauman said, “The good society is the one that knows it is not good enough.” (Something that should be true of the Church as well.)
That way of seeing the world contrasted with the people who said that what we had was the best we could ever manage or (worse) said it was so good we shouldn’t try to change it. The fact that the people who said this were comfortable did not escape me.
Continued below.
The Lenten Cure for Secular Optimism
COMMENTARY: I love Lent, but some people don’t, and sometimes I don’t either.
