“And suddenly you just know…it’s time to start something new and trust the magic of beginnings.” – Meister Eckhart
Lent is so deliciously Catholic, so liturgical, so robes and incense and ashes on forehead (says the grown-up lapsed Southern Baptist). I didn’t grow up following the lectionary, so Lent became a balm in midlife while searching for solid food having been malnourished on contemporary western pop-church fare. I craved something ancient, sprinting as far as possible from quippy sermon series unanchored to the global church. I needed less “dropping plastic Easter eggs from a helicopter over the church property” and more “some tiny church in Turkey is praying these same words today.” The gospel is either true everywhere or it is true nowhere, which makes it fairly easy to discern.
Without much mentorship, I initially located Lent in the familiar bucket of self-flagellation. Oh, do without? Suffer? Deny myself a beloved comfort? Pardon me, but I am already a professional here. I spent my entire childhood mastering the religious to-do and not-to-do lists, and the second was bottomless, so. I can absolutely go without and feel quite self-righteous about it while we’re at it. Social media made virtue signaling easy (and rewarded!), so the game was afoot.
But I’ve had a sneaking suspicion for some time that God isn’t as interested in arbitrary self-denial as I thought. I keep feeling like he is, well, more into us than that. Pretty sure Jesus knows it is a full mess down here, and we are already suffering and hurting and sad and scared. Being a human is just relentless.
What might preparing for the resurrection look like not from a lens of scarcity but abundance?
Could we be so audacious to imagine God might cherish his children more than their chastity?
I don’t know. I didn’t invent Lent (and neither did the Bible, so that is no help either). It was a later practice added by early Christians, and its origins are varied depending on the source. But I wonder if the through line of “self-discipline” might be reimagined through a spirit of generosity, not just regulation. If the end game is indeed new life, perhaps we can consider Lent practices that are reaching for the same.
It is no mystery that I am in something of a midlife renaissance, if you’ll forgive the egregious term. But frankly, most of my agemates are, not because we crossed some secret threshold, but because as Brené Brown says, “Midlife is when the universe gently places her hands upon your shoulders, pulls you close, and whispers in your ear: I’m not screwing around. It’s time.” Something about aging bodies, aging parents, aging children leaving the nest, relationships that are reorienting themselves or running out of fuel, our appetites turning toward a gentler, softer way of living – indeed, it is just time.
This year, I am curious about the intersection of Lent and midlife. Could such a sacred spiritual practice be an invitation into this middle age becoming? Might forty days of intention be in service to a second half of life worthy of her weeks and years? Lent could be a tool for women who have finally figured out that God is not mad at us, and we are not in perpetual penance to a deity whose disappointment can never be appeased.
If none of this resonates, by all means, leave it behind entirely. But if you worked to please God your entire life and never felt his pleasure, if giving up and giving in and giving over didn’t deliver the internal peace the religious patriarchy promised, then perhaps Lent this year could be something generous, something nourishing with lasting power worthy of an empty tomb that said Death, where is your sting?
Lent is fundamentally about Jesus, because it just is. Otherwise, it is simply abstinence or restriction or taking a break or Dry January. It’s not like Christianity has the market cornered on restraint. And again, Lent wasn’t written on stone tablets or monologued by an angel. It is a practice that has changed shape through the centuries and remains a tool for spiritual seekers to ready their hearts for new life.
Thus, allow me to imagine a Lent practice that says: With a spirit of prayer, I will spend ten minutes a day releasing a commitment or habit that no longer serves me, or onboarding a new practice that does. Particularly through the lens of midlife, we are literally transitioning forward from old versions of ourselves. Can you fathom the release of forty practices or patterns that no longer serve us, and the gentle adoption of others that might? If that seems an outrageous fantasy, let me just fire off maybe my own first ten knowing I could easily come up with the other thirty:
- I will stop storing up offenses and writing whole stories in my mind.
- I will stop taking responsibility for my child’s happiness without their participation.
- I will stop leaving the trash cans at the curb for three days, because it makes me feel like I am not handling home ownership well. (If it makes me feel bad, I can include it.)
- I will not weigh myself every morning anymore.
- I will wait three days to see if I still really, really want that Amazon or Instagram buy-now thing. (I probably won’t. I almost never do.)
- I will stop assuming no one wants to hear about my problems/decisions until I have them sorted and resolved. (This is an issue in my closest relationships.)
- I will text someone the second I have a lovely thought about them.
- I will make a delicious lunch on a real plate every day instead of eating like a raccoon.
- I will spend 3-4 days a week reading at night instead of watching a night show.
- I will actively disagree with the mean internal voice that keeps telling me I am being lazy. (The Enneagram 3 is so plagued by productivity.)
Look, if I only practiced these ten new patterns at maybe a 43% rate, they would certainly usher in new life. Uplinking these to meta-Jesus ideas, I see: kindness, appropriate relational boundaries, discipline, loving this body I’ve been gifted with, responsibility, vulnerability, taking every destructive thought captive. These are certainly included in the ancient blueprint; old, sturdy, good ideas still.
Or maybe one new practice is so all-encompassing, so massive a shift, it takes up all of Lent by itself. I love that.
- Forty days of zero passive aggressiveness.
- Forty days of not doing your coworker’s job at all.
- Forty days of holding a boundary you set but haven’t enforced.
- Forty days off the sauce of contempt.
- Forty days of only positive body talk.
However it shakes out, practicing Lent through the grid of love and compassion, goodness and kindness, gentleness and generosity feels like Jesus to me. If these are not his mainstays, then I truly never understood him at all. But I think I do, despite the noisy political attempt to plunder his name. For those of us experiencing a coming of middle age, the gift of forty days of spiritual intention might help us release old patterns and reach toward new life as it calls us forward…one more step, one more, keep coming. You’re just getting to the good stuff, beloved.
“Perhaps Lent is about receiving the things of God that are meant to shape us for what is yet to come.” – Unknown