I grew up going to York Baptist Church in York, Alabama. Mild-mannered small Southern town congregation. Pre-megachurch days. Maybe I just wasn’t paying attention, but I don’t remember actually doing anything in particular during Lent.
In fact I almost certainly wasn’t paying attention, but I don’t think Baptists actually “did” Lent.
Individualized expressive actions were implicitly suspect somehow, with worship services kind of kept to a fairly formalized minimalism as I recall. For example, communion was taken with the congregation remaining seated in the pews; walking up the aisle was pretty much restricted to weddings and funerals.
And, much unlike us at Beloved, certainly no one would have considered ‘rocking the house’ in church, although due to the totally square nature of the music this would have been unlikely if not impossible anyway.
I only bring all this up to say that even after a certain amount of ‘studying up’ on Lent (a result of being at Beloved), I still only have a vague ‘intellectual’ understanding of Lent’s personal importance, particularly as a specific period of time. It was not a frame of reference in my ‘religious upbringing,’ you could say.
Anyway, I gather that Lent can involve fasting, renunciation, empathy with suffering, preparation for renewal perhaps, but truthfully I’m not sure at all that I actually ‘get’ Lent, so I’ve found it difficult to get a handle on the Reflections.
Yet I also understand that at least at Beloved there is nothing in specific that Lenten Reflections are supposed to be, or to be about, which apparently means that I should mention here that something about ‘repentance’ comes to mind just now, although it’s too ephemeral to ‘reflect’ anything definite.
Be that as it may, regardless of the season I’m obliged to repent every day for my wrongdoings, or rather for the wrongs that I am constantly doing. For me, repentance is of necessity a daily affair; otherwise by Lent each year I’ll have built up far too many unaddressed failings to even keep track of, let alone renounce. I’m talking landfill here.
This includes all those unintentional or unrecognized hurtful deeds that just ‘come naturally’ from my inherently flawed perceptions and behaviors in life at any given moment.
Thoughts, words and actions; these are the main three things that I trust in God’s guidance for, not only because they are the arenas of the three main gifts, but because these are also the three main routes along which I’ve always gotten myself into trouble.
Actually, much more important to me in my prayers are requests and thanks for God’s assured guidance in always trying not to do wrong in the first place. Of course ‘not doing wrong’ is a preposterous idea, since lousing things up in the eyes of the Lord is one of the basic traits of humanity. A persistent design quirk; the urge to sidestep the Holy.
Negativities notwithstanding, I feel certain that God wants me to focus on the positive energies, on absorbing and reflecting the light wherever it can be encountered.
In my experience this is a tall order indeed; in fact it’s beyond me. That’s where grace and faith come in. And thus always being thankful for the Light, wherever we may be blessed to find it, which can be more or less anywhere, and which is in fact everywhere, even when it’s only visible at the end of a tunnel.
-Davey Williams
