This article was originally published in the Lent 2024 Bellringer
Cast me not away from your presence and take not your holy Spirit from me.
Psalm 51, page 266, BCP
At St. Mary’s Psalm 51 is said or sung while the clergy impose ashes early in the Ash Wednesday liturgy. Of all the petitions included in this psalm, which happens also to be one of the verses included in the part of Psalm 51 used in the Daily Devotion intended for use in the morning, I believe we hear one of the deepest longings we humans have throughout our lives: please don’t leave me alone. Oh yes, like Jesus who often went alone into the mountains after a day of preaching and healing to pray and prepare himself for another day of ministry in the morning, we often long for some quiet time to pause and breathe, to regroup after a particularly demanding day. But we want solitude to come on our terms; we want to seek it out, we don’t want to feel abandoned.
One way to overcome a sense of abandonment is to genuinely grow closer to God which is what I believe the disciplines and self-denial of Lent are all about. We’re asked to clear away some of the clutter of our lives, be it our fixation on food, our phones, or our incessant busyness, in order to reflect on what really matters, our relationships with God, with each other, and with ourselves. When, where, under what circumstances do we feel closest to God? Perhaps carving out time each day to go to that place, literally or figuratively, would be a meaningful Lenten discipline to adopt. Perhaps in getting to know the God who lives within us, we’ll get to know ourselves better. And if that time of introspection causes us to come face to face with our shortcomings, well, repentance and seeking forgiveness are right at the heart of what Lent is about.
So if fasting on Ash Wednesday and Good Friday, abstaining from certain foods during Lent genuinely helps us feel closer to God then by all mean, that should definitely be one of our Lenten discipline. But if those dietary changes are really just about losing the weight we put on during Christmastide, then perhaps we should keep looking for another discipline that will allow us to awaken on Easter morning not merely physically leaner, but spiritually wiser, better able to make the God who has become more real to us, more real to the world in which we live.
