ANOTHER BORING LENT

Abba Elias the priest said “To find joy, lament your sins.”—from Words of the Desert

Lent is for sinners. When I quit sinning, I’ll quit keeping it. If my past is any guide to my future, I have as many Lents in front of me as I do years.

Lent invigorates me and irritates me. I enjoy its challenges, but tire easily of its constant emphasis on sin—especially my sin. If Lent focused on what a sinner you are, I’d love the season.

I don’t like thinking about my sins. They show me to be somebody other than the person I imagine I am; they tell me truths I don’t want to hear.

“Spiritual growth” sounds good; it sounds good for you, like the vegetarian plate at a steak house. The idea of spiritual growth is popular. Except for books about sultry teenage vampires, the majority of top-selling books on Amazon last year had to do with “spirituality.” It’s popular. “If you want the rainbow, you must put up with the rain,” or “As the purse is emptied the heart is filled,” or this banal insight: “Our first and last love...is self love.” We easily take to truths not worth considering.

The reason we keep “doing” Lent is it tells the truths we don’t want to consider but need to hear—indeed, to “learn, mark, hear and inwardly digest.” I dislike Lent because I don’t like its truth: I sin because I like to, and if I’m gonna stop sinning it’s not gonna be fun.

Abba Elias the priest (a member of a notoriously “unfun” profession) said, “To find joy, lament.” That sounds like something a priest would say. “Sorrow is fun.”

His gloomy words, though, mean just the opposite. If we want to find deep-seated joy, abiding joy, the kind that lasts, face who you are. Only when I come to terms with myself, not as a hopelessly lost sinner dangling over the eternal fiery pit, “a sinner in the hands of an angry god,” but as one of God’s creations who loves to sin but wants to love God too, only then can I begin to lay the foundation for joy.

Joy isn’t what you feel when you close the Big Deal or pick up your new truck. Those good feelings fade. Joy endures, because it’s not grounded on my emotions or my thoughts—or me, for that matter. Joy, the certainty that I’m in God’s hands and whatever comes is a sign of His love, only sin can shake.

That’s why sin is bad, that’s why we need Lent. The somber truth of Lent, the one I’m tired of hearing, is that I’m a sinner. The truth I don’t often grasp is why it matters. The most fundamental truth of Lent is not that I’m a sinner, but that sin holds me back from what I really want. Lent promises there is Something Better. “In His presence,” David sang, “is the fullness of joy.”

“Lament your sins,” Abba Elias cajoles us, “and find your Joy.”

Lent isn’t best kept with long faces but eager eyes, looking beyond sin to the Hope it hides.