In the Protestant and Catholic traditions, today is Shrove Tuesday. Most people in North America know today by its more popular name—Mardi Gras, a day for pancakes and watching most of New Orleans go more than a little bit wild.
"Shrove" is actually the past tense of the English verb "to shrive," a verb that doesn't conform to all of those neat and tidy conjugation rules that I learned in school, but is nonetheless a very useful word for followers of Christ to know. According to Merriam Webster, "to shrive" means "to confess ones sins, especially to a priest" or "to administer the sacrament of reconciliation to" or, most kindly, "to free from guilt."
To free from guilt.
That phrase just makes you take a deep breath, doesn't it? And along with that deep breath comes the inflowing, ever-present life of God. The very fact that we breathe, that we are sustained by breath, is a reminder that God is with us, that through the wonder and mystery of Christ's life, death and resurrection we are being continually reconciled with God.
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Yesterday, I had a long conversation with a good friend in England (where they're more likely to use the term "shrove") about what we have been hearing from God about Lent. We talked about various types of fasts, from the more traditional abstaining from meat to the more contemporary abstaining from Facebook for 40 days. We wrangled with the meaning of Lent, and gently named for each other what things in our lives took the place of God, where we needed repentance.
In Renovaré's Explorations: Rhythms of Life resource, Renovaré President Chris Webb writes about living by the seasons and outlines the rhythms of the Christian liturgical year. Lent, Chris writes, is "a time of repentance, an opportunity to experience the mercy of God, to be set free from past patterns of behavior, and to embrace a life of joyful holiness."
That's another place where both my friend and I took a deep, cleansing breath.
An opportunity to experience the mercy of God. To be set free. To embrace a life of joyful holiness.
Don't those sound wonderful? Don't they sound just like the heart of our God?
Rather than take up something simply by habit ("I always give up chocolate for Lent"), my friend and I began to probe gently into the places that our hearts were already convicting us. Those places that, if we stopped long enough to listen, we felt that familiar, nagging guilt. This isn't the way it was meant to be. This isn't God's best for me. And then we began to think outside of the box.
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The title of this post is a tip of the hat to one of my favorite contemporary poets, Madeleine L'Engle. In an anthology of poetry published in 2005, a few years before her death, called The Ordering of Love, I found this poem:
For Lent, 1966
It's my Lent to break my Lent,
To eat when I would fast,
To know when slender strength is spent,
Take shelter from the blast
When I would run with wind and rain,
To sleep when I would watch.
It is my Lent to smile at pain
But not ignore its touch.
It is my Lent to listen well
When I would be alone,
To talk when I would rather dwell
In silence, turn from none
Who call on me, to try to see
That what is truly meant
Is not my choice. If Christ's I'd be
It's thus I'll keep my Lent.
"For Lent, 1966" in The Ordering of Love, p. 303, Colorado Springs, CO: Shaw Books, 2005.
For Lent, 2010, my friend and I came to some conclusions similar to Madeleine's conclusions. What's truly meant is that it isn't my choice, my life, my Lent. It's actually time to let go of the tyranny of "me," of the things I choose and the plans I make. Because my friend and I—and I know you, too—want to be Christ's, utterly and only Christ's, Lent is about letting go of the things that keep us from Him.
Sometimes, like Madeleine, that means letting go of austerity or rigorous disciplines and remembering that you are human, frail and dependent on God. It means taking care of yourself, and entering into rest, rather than more frantic, frenetic activity.
Sometimes, like my friend, it means letting go of insularity, asking Christ to come in to break self-preoccupation. For her, Lent 2010 means fasting from self-indulgence. Instead, she's decided to do something kind every day, for someone else. To put the needs of a friend or a stranger above her own, and actively love them like Christ does. To let go of the guilt of feeling like she makes things about herself, and instead embrace the discipline of caring for others, whether she feels like it at that precise moment or not. It's a different type of self-denial. One that helps her to deny that self that takes the place of Christ, and find that self that Christ has come to liberate, to set free.
• • •
Which brings me back to today, Shrove Tuesday. In addition to being about fried dough (something that became a tradition as a way of getting rid of all the things you were fasting from the night before Ash Wednesday—butter, lard, leavening), today is about preparing yourself for the Lenten disciplines that make us more available to God's transforming power. It's about shriving, confessing to one another the sins that keep us from receiving the mercy of God, from being set free.
Whether you confess to your priest, your pastor or to one another, may I suggest that we reclaim today as the beginning of a process that opens us up to God. To His freedom. To His absolution. To His hope. To His life. Rather than our own. Shrove Tuesday is a glorious day—a day when we confess the places that we have fallen short, chosen ourselves, chosen sin. It is a day of authenticity, a day that leads beautifully into the penitence of Ash Wednesday and prepares us to enter into the disciplines of abstinence of Lent with joyful hearts.
Shrive well, friends.