Good morning! I haven't sent out one of these emails since last summer. As I mentioned on Instagram yesterday, I've been working through some feelings I have about writing and whether or not I deserve to write about God, or about anything, frankly. (My confidence, it's been low!) But also, the things I share are shared from a place of love, and also I'm trying to be more brave about, well, life. And I'm going to make an effort to be more consistent with these beginning-of-the-month emails, because they're good for me. I'm glad you're here!
So much love,
Brittany
Lent started this week, with Ash Wednesday. I don’t know the demographics of my audience very well here (how many of you are religious?), and so I never know how much I should explain. But, briefly: Lent is a season in the Christian liturgical calendar that lasts about forty days, from Ash Wednesday till Easter. It mirrors the forty days Jesus spent fasting in the desert and being tempted by Satan, and traditionally, it’s a sober time of penance, fasting, and almsgiving.
People often give something up during Lent in an effort to make more space for God in their lives. I always tackled the Lents of my childhood in a frenzy of self-improvement and personal optimization, like a New Years Resolution: Take Two (hello perfectionism!). From the outside, I was always “good” at Lent. I am, truly, just really good at following rules and being disciplined. But the point of Lent is to draw us closer to God, and all of my Lenten practices--giving up sweets, keeping my room clean, even praying more--felt weirdly self-focused. Look at me God, I am being good! And so Lent never felt particularly meaningful to me. It was mostly a chance to make up more rules I could follow in an effort to please God. (I was pretty insufferable, sometimes I still am.)
So much of this flowed from my teenage conception of God. Growing up, the Catholics I knew were big on the whole “faith without works is dead” thing. My little perfectionist heart twisted this concept too much, and as a result, I internalized this idea that I could win God’s favor by being extra-virtuous. My shameful secret here is that I always liked this patriarchal, scorekeeping God. I still do! He’s so simple! This is a God I can be good for, a God I can score points with by doing the right thing, being the right person, following the rules, toeing the line. I never felt like God didn’t love me when I sinned. I just also felt like God loved me a lot more when I didn’t.
One of truly terrifying things about Christianity is that sometimes the God we reach for is different from the God who reaches for us. Since my return to some kind of faith, the God I’m encountering in quiet and prayerful moments is not God the Cosmic Scorekeeper. What is reaching for me is something like God the Divine Love. A God to whom I have nothing to prove. A God who doesn’t love me more if I make no mistakes, a God who doesn’t love me less when I inevitably screw up. Friends, it actually doesn’t feel good! At least not to me, at least not right now. Mostly it feels like free fall. How do I live my life if I’m not constantly trying to win God’s favor? This isn’t a rhetorical question. This kind of divine love feels uncomfortable enough that my instinct is to turn away from it. But also, I want it to feel good. I want to be brave enough to face it. I want to learn to love it.
Lent is about metanoia. The word is often translated as “repentance,” but it’s not that, exactly. It literally means “change of mind.” It’s a conversion. A decision to turn around, to face God. What I’m trying to do is face God. To make space for God by opening myself to that love instead of studiously, scrupulously ignoring it. And so that’s what I’m doing during Lent. It’s all I’m doing. Trying to loosen my tight, frightened fists. Trying to let myself take one deep breath, and another, and another. Trying to spend more time doing absolutely nothing but sitting in stillness and facing the fact that God loves me just as I am. To borrow lines from my favorite Marie Howe poem: I want to learn to swim around in what shines at me, even though sometimes I feel like I’ll die from being loved like that.
So bittersweet. Thank you for sharing that.