Happy blog post title, hm? Yes and no. Many of us recoil even from the word pandemic, rightly wanting to mark these odd times simply living as if this strange reality hasn’t touched us yet, or isn’t going to anymore. This is as good a coping strategy as many and as long as we don’t move to the ‘hoax’ version of truth, we can keep going kindly to us and others and we’ll all see each other eventually. For others, we recoil from the word Lent, having as it does, layers and layers of meaning, ritual and rigidity depending on how we’ve encountered it.
As ever, I seek to re-frame; to find the positive reality in the midst of the encompassing reality we’re experiencing. The pandemic is. It is simply a reality. It has been horrible for many, exhausting for even more, tragic for more than that and life changing for all of us. I’ll seldom teach my project management in a classroom again. Not that there will be no more classrooms, but because the course is so much better when people who’ve never met before are in their own comfort zones, are with their own technology, have access to their real work files and are not frustrated in finding an unknown venue on top of travelling to it. There have been so many positive developments in relationships and communities of friendship, worship and learning, that I have no yearning to move ahead in time to what used to be.
Lent, to me, is an annual reminder in the cycle of my memory work with God. Each year, I cycle from Advent to Pentecost stopping in Lent to remember. It is that particular season when I revisit the political upheaval caused by a revolutionary prophet, come to name the painful truth inside societies and religions then and now. Some society and religious people are proud of themselves, believing their own myths of wealth and equity, while so many in their midst know poverty as a life-long sentence. Lent is reminder time and I live it by laying down the things which worry me and I can’t change – a bit like the strategy to avoid the word pandemic. But as I put down what I can’t change, I pick up the calls to justice I see everywhere. If I stop giving power to my worry, I can re-energise my hope and my activity towards that for others.
Here’s a prayer I wrote for the pandemic, available on the United Reformed Church website:
Dear and glorious God, we cry to you.
At the moment, love seems both deeply hidden and alive like never before.
Selfishness is alarmingly exposed, numbing us to the fear which feeds it.
Selflessness is gloriously and exhaustingly alive, restoring our faith in you and in humanity.
In this Lenten time, stir in us, waking your love, enriching us with grace to be gracious.
Comfort us to know that our small steps made well are your active, powerful love.
Amen.
