Life Together

by C. Chappell Temple

It's been perhaps the strangest one which I can remember, at least for a very long time.  For ever since decades ago as a teenager I started the practice of observing or "keeping" Lent, I've usually also determined to "give up" something for that six week season, whether it be a pleasure so simple as sweets or, more substantially, a not so helpful habit in my life.  To be certain, it hasn't always changed things for me over the long term-- I've usually gone back to enjoying chocolate or soft drinks almost immediately after the Easter sunrise service has ended, for instance.  But the practice has allowed me to re-focus a bit on what actually matters in life. For each time I have thought about what it was which I wasn't experiencing, albeit temporarily, I have also remembered why, and my mind instead has thus been redirected in more spiritual directions.

This Lenten season, however, I will confess that it never quite came together for me.  Perhaps it was because Lent arrived so early, compelled to do so by the rather complicated and centuries old calculation for setting the date for Easter, that it fall on "the first Sunday following the first ecclesiastical full moon that occurs on or after the day of the vernal equinox," or March 21.  Easter can thus never arrive before March 22 or come later than April 25, and so with the 2008 celebration set for March 23, it's almost as fresh within the year as it can ever be.

Whether I can really blame it on Pope Gregory XII who set the calendar way back in 1582 or not, however, the end result is that Lent got here before I was ready for it.  And so when Ash Wednesday (or "Copier Toner Day," as we almost had to call it) rolled around, I was unprepared to give up anything.  Until it dawned upon me that what I actually gave up for Lent this year was my mom. When she died on January 25, I surrendered back to God a woman who plainly served as the longest running spiritual influence in my life.  Only this Lent, I know that I won't be able to get her back come Easter, or at least not physically so.  As so many others who have lost a loved one will probably understand, thus, this has been a somewhat bittersweet season for me, as I have veered between the busyness born of managing both an estate and all manner of emotions and memories.

In some ways, though, I've also re-discovered a different truth for my life during these days, namely that in the process of pain and grief, our God stands right beside us, for that simple fact that he put aside his immunity to pain when He freely chose to suffer on the cross on our behalf.  When we are broken by life, in fact, so is he, and when we weep, He weeps with us as well.  He even descends into all of our private hells, for as Corrie Ten Boom once reminded us, speaking from her own horrendous experience in a Nazi death camp, "no matter how deep our darkness, He is deeper still."

One of our creeds puts it this way: "...in life, in death, in life beyond death, God is with us.  We are not alone. Thanks be to God."  When Easter soon arrives, that will be the song of my heart, as well.  For I have a feeling that perhaps only those who have been bruised by the rude intrusion of death in life can really understand the incredible promise of resurrection.  And Lent or no Lent, that's surely worth "giving it up" for Easter, don't you think?