Lenting Solo

Depiction of the Prodigal Son

In The Book of Common Prayer according to the use of the Episcopal Church, the Ash Wednesday liturgy begins with a collect. First, the congregation affirms the God who forgives. Corporately, they admit guilt and humbly request that the Triune God "make in us new and contrite hearts." Then, the Celebrant is to detail the history of Lent: it was a season of penitence and fasting to prepare for the celebration of the death and resurrection of Christ, a time to prepare new converts for Baptism, and a time to restore excommunicated Christian sisters and brothers to the body of the faithful. 

I invite you, therefore, in the name of the Church, to the observance of a holy Lent, by self-examination and repentance; by prayer, fasting, and self-denial; and by reading and meditating on God's holy Word. And, to make a right beginning of repentance, and as a mark of our mortal nature, let us now kneel before the Lord, our maker and redeemer.  

[Silence is then to be kept for a time, all kneeling]    

In The Origins of the Liturgical Year, Thomas Talley discusses the shift in Lenten emphasis from baptismal preparation to "general public penitential observance." To quote Talley at length:

In the face of [the promise of redemption at hand in the death and resurrection of the Lord], those reaching toward faith in the initiatory process, those lost to the community of faith seeking reconciliation, and all who have learned in faith that both new birth and reconciliation are but sacraments pointing to realities that rush toward us from the future, all alike know the time that moves toward Pacha as the time of metanoia, the time of conversion, the time of repentance, the time that identifies our human lives and all our human history as the process of conversion moving now and always to meet the coming of the Lord at the consummation of the age. (pg 224) 

Lenten-time calls the women and men of the Body to bow their bodies before God in preparation for the observance of the breaking, burying, and raising of Christ's body. Lent does not divide the physical from the spiritual. The called-for observances in the above liturgy are a mix of physical and spiritual practices which weave into one another, dancing so closely together that they must of one accord move the holistic body toward repentance.  Lent is profoundly aware that the human is a unity. Spiritual discipline is a physical practice.

The catholic Church herself invites the people of God to repentance. However, she calls her children together in specific places and through the varied voices of women and men across the world. Singular bodies kneel side-by-side, joined in presence as the local body, and mystically unite with the greater Body. As Talley indicated, in the season of Lent, the very body of human history is intentionally oriented to God and God's time. In preparation for Easter, we bend our individual, physical, local, spiritual, mystical, universal, and history-itself bodies to the Triune God. We purposefully, corporately, corporeally and even painfully turn our holistic selves away from that which does not please God and toward the new reality inaugurated in Christ's body. 

In history, Lent prepared converts for the baptism of their bodies-- "Or don't you know that all of us who were baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? We were therefore buried with him through baptism into death in order that, just as Christ was raised from the dead through the glory of the Father, we too may life a new life" (Romans 6:3-4). Lent also prepared the local body to absorb the sins of individual bodies in forgiveness because Christ took our sins upon His body; the straying individual disciplined her or his body by putting off stubborn, self-destructive, self-isolating actions and accepted both the forgiveness and the demands of God. In coming home to the Father, the prodigal child also comes home to the local body to be taken into the physical arms of other believers and to be reminded by many voices that there is in Christ new creation--the old has passed. "Walk again with us the way of new creation." Lent is about holistic bodies.

I failed at Lent this year. I didn't make it more than three days in my desired focus on the discipline of prayer. I gave up on giving up that which I had given up for Lent. I did not intentionally self-examine nor did I meditate on God's holy Word any more than usual. My local body does not intentionally observe Lent, and I failed at Lenting Solo. I learned that Lent is not intended to be solo. Lent cannot be appropriated in the likeness of American individualism. Just as God molded humankind in Genesis and said it was not good that humans fly solo, so the Spirit is committed to molding humankind into new creation as a family affair:  

ἢ οὐκ οἴδατε ὅτι τὸ σῶμα ὑμῶν ναὸς τοῦ ἐν ὑμῖν ἁγίου πνεύματός ἐστιν οὗ ἔχετε ἀπὸ θεοῦ, καὶ οὐκ ἐστὲ ἑαυτῶν; (1 Cor. 6:19) 

Do you all not know that your (plural) body is a temple of the Holy Spirit who is in you (plural) whom you (plural) have from God, and that you (plural) are not your (plural) own? (NAB) 

Παρακαλῶ οὖν ὑμᾶς, ἀδελφοί, διὰ τῶν οἰκτιρμῶν τοῦ θεοῦ παραστῆσαι τὰ σώματα ὑμῶν θυσίαν ζῶσαν ἁγίαν εὐάρεστον τῷ θεῷ, τὴν λογικὴν λατρείαν ὑμῶν (Romans 12:1) 

Therefore, I urge you, brothers and sisters, in view of God's mercy, to offer your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and pleasing to God-- this is your true and proper worship. (NIV)

Our bodies are remade and reoriented in the presence of the community. We kneel in mystical unity with the Church catholic, yes, but we must kneel side-by-side with our sisters and brothers. It is through them, through our prayers together, through guided prying into each other's life, through the nudging of our kneeling knees that we must be formed by the Holy Spirit in repentance. It is these holistic bodies we have most likely harmed in the things we have said or done and in the things we have left unsaid and undone, who will then turn us to the tangible, holistic bodies  of our neighbors from whom we also need forgiveness. 

In Lent, we repent and mourn our sin and the heart-and-body-breaking state of the world that results. We acknowledge that "the cancer-racked body, the war-torn body the body racialized and then enslaved or incinerated, the body raped or beaten, the body twisted out of recognition by inner or outer torture--all cry out in chorus for theological conceptualization." And we proclaim that "only when the body is conceptualized firmly in reference to the body for which Christians hope, the body redeemed in Jesus Christ, can we account for the broken bodies of humanity." (Beth Felker Jones, Marks of His Wounds, pgs 9-10). Seeking God's pardon in Lent cannot only be an individual event, because the pardon we need, the redemption we seek, the story in which we partake demands a much wider, grander event. I failed at Lenting solo because there is no such thing. God has still been faithful to me in this season The Spirit has brought things to the surface which call loudly for my examination and repentance. However, Lent remains a body (single)/ body (local)/ Body (universal) observance.

Remember that you (singularly and corporately) are dust, and to dust you shall return.

And, together, from the dust we shall be corporeally and corporately raised.

Therefore, my dear brothers and sisters, stand firm. Let nothing move you. Always give yourself fully to the work of the Lord, because you know that your labor in the Lord is not in vain. (1 Cor. 15:58)