Cleaning your Lent Filter

Lint in your dryer is at best a distraction and at worst something that will totally destroy your dryer, or even cause your apartment complex to burn down when it catches on fire. That’s what the humble lint filter is for, clearing away the unwanted distraction of lint and preventing apartment fires. 

If you’re from Oklahoma or Texas, “lint” and “lent” are homonyms (due, if you must know, to a neutralization of the contrast between [ɛ] and [ɩ] before nasals. That’s why we have to say “ink pen” and “stick pin” to differentiate pɛn from pɩn. See, I knew you didn’t really want to know.)

Lent – not lint - is one of the rhythms that the church has followed for centuries. It is a time to confess our resistance to the light, and time of preparation for the death and resurrection of Jesus. A time of considering Christ’s suffering and “rethinking how we are called to take up our crosses”. It’s a time to focus on dying to ourselves and the best way to do that is to “practice denying ourselves through the forty days of Lent, fasting from stuff that we usually enjoy so we can learn to hunger and thirst for God’s kingdom.¹

I come from a tradition that does not practice Lent but in recent years I have been around more people who do and will be doing it for this first time this year. Last year around this time, I was at the Boiler Room in Kansas City surrounded by people most of whom had given up something for Lent: meat, cooked food, sugar, chocolate, even jaywalking – which is harder than you might think if you live downtown and walk everywhere. You’d be surprised how long it takes those crosswalks to change. (Thanks, Beau, for the lesson in respecting civil authority).  

I don’t really claim to pretend that I understand HOW fasting or giving up chocolate, meat, twitter or TV for 40 days could bring me closer to God. Brian McLaren says that fasting doesn’t make him feel closer to God; mostly it makes him feel “closer to pizza.” Sometimes, though, you just have to have confidence that a community has certain practices for a reason and you trust the community enough to engage in the practice. Brian says that fasting helps him feel and acknowledge his weakness in the face of impulses and cravings of his body. Fasting helps him trade something he can see (donuts) for something he can’t. ²

Fasting, in general, or limited fasting during Lent, is a way we can show God we love Him more than the thing we can see before us that looks so appetizing or appealing.³

Lent is really about obedience, practicing obedience to something outside ourselves. Dennis Okholm (quoting Brian Taylor) says,

“We like to think of ourselves as independent rugged individuals who make our own rules. But. . . . if we seek God’s will for our life, every choice we make requires a new obedience. Even in our ordinary lives, we ‘have to serve somebody,’ some institution, some tradition, or some rules.

"I have found that through the limits of obedience, I grow beyond the confines of the self with its desires and traps." ⁴

Patrick Morely says that “Fasting releases the participant from the confusion of competing voices. Your personality and temperament will affect the kinds of things that distract from your relationship with God. For me, it’s work. I’ve discovered fasting as a way to slow down my RPM’s protecting my focus on Jesus Christ.”⁵

So I’ve thought quite a bit about what distraction I can give up this Lent season and will be giving up Facebook, as well as probably some sort of food item which I haven’t decided on yet. I’ll let you know how it goes. . . but not on Facebook. 

Blessed are they who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled.

Footnotes:

1. Shain Claiborne, et al, CommonPrayer: A liturgy for ordinary Radicals.

2. Brian McClaren, Findingour way again: the return of the ancient practices, p. 84

3. Patrick Morely, Aman’s guide to the spiritual disciplines. p. 121

4. Dennis Okholm, MonkHabits for Everyday people. p. 66-67

5. Patrick Morely, A man’s guide to the spiritual disciplines. p. 121