Swimming through Lent

Among the various spiritual practices that form my Lenten discipline, this year I am reading my way through a small compilation of the writings of twentieth century Anglican mystic Evelyn Underhill. As dated as some of her minor references come across, a true mystic speaks both to her time and beyond time.  In Lent we are called to pray with a fresh voice: Underhill offers us an analogy that goes to heart of the matter. She writes, “the fish swims in the ocean but does not create it, neither does the Christian at prayer create the life of prayer but enters into it and is invigorated by it.” 

As we enter into Lent today on Ash Wednesday, our first decision really is whether we are going to accept this annual opportunity to listen, dig, swim, pause and be silent in God’s presence. Underhill writes: “Lent is a good moment for such a spiritual stocktaking; a pause, a retreat from life’s busy surface to its solemn deeps. There we can consider our possessions; and discriminate between the necessary stores which have been issued to us, and must be treasured and kept in good order, and the odds and ends which we have accumulated ourselves.”  I suggest that to go-to “giving up-taking on” formula of the season can be expanded to things beyond practices and food.

Lent is one of the more counter-cultural things we can do in a society that demands constant consumer spending and activity to prop-up a post-manufacturing based economy. Even a rational effort to save money for a rainy day or pay off credit card debts is said to routinely threaten growth. We text, tweet, post, email, DVR, and blog our way through these times in the face of a God who says be still and know me. Lent is yearly off-ramp for all of us.

So if you and I fellow fish take on this task of preparing ourselves for the outpouring of grace and hope that is the Easter feast, then let’s be prepared to swim upstream, alone at times and enter unknown and deep waters. There will be find the One who made us and who calls us into everlasting relationship.

Let Lent begin!