Every year seems to play out the same.

Fall begins with a new year’s fervor, and I get some semblance of rhythm and regularity to my life. And I do very well with this. My mental (and marital) health needs structure, schedule, and routine to flourish.

Then–bam–the holidays hit and all those bulwarks against insanity fall away. And I struggle. I eat too much, stay up too late, and my spiritual disciplines become ad hoc and more random. I’m irritable.

And I have this nasty tendency to emotionally hide from others and myself as I hate the chaos that churns within me. (Merry Christmas!)

I stumble from the holiday fog and drift in a malaise for a few months–struggling to find rhythm again, trying to catch up on work I got out of the habit of doing, and straining to be the kind of human I wish to be. Or maybe just feel human at all.

It’s about this time that Ash Wednesday and Lent come around. Right when I need it most.

And it usually ends up serving as the perfect balm and reset for me to get some structure, humanity, and communion into my body once more.

Lent vs. Death

I love the Church Calendar (remember how I need structure?). But I really love Lent. It suits me and the shape of my inner life–that which makes me a good therapist. When I see brokenness, loss, and human frailty something in me wants to run towards it and is able to be present in it.

But I have a secret. Even as I say this right now, I feel a rising dissonance in my soul.

For on one hand, I fashion myself as some adult emo kid who loves to sit in darkness, pain, and melancholy. But if I’m honest, when it comes to the ultimate expression of that–my own death and mortality–I spend so much energy trying to avoid thinking about it.

I think I run after pain and brokenness (both in me and others) partly from a desire and hope to see it healed and transcended. I need to believe in an alchemy undergirding all things where that which is broken can be made beautiful. Because if it can’t, what hope is there for me?

But death cannot easily be brought through that furnace and turned to gold. And even to the extent that I, as a Christian, believe it is in some sense a doorway to life, this is an article of faith–not anything I have been able to directly see or bring about.

Because (to quote an emo kid from Denmark), that “something after death” is “the undiscover’d country, from whose bourne no traveller returns.”

Despite all our strivings, the question “to be, or not to be” always arrives at the same answer eventually.

So death lingers in the air above us all; that one thing we can’t ever do anything about in any meaningful way. Even as I strive and grow in my therapy practice to bring healing and life wherever I can, death still remains.

And yet…

Ash Wednesday reminds us that death is the shape of God’s promise. This great cosmological constant is not one that God blithely keeps us from or simply waves away.

Far from just rescuing us or fashioning a salvation that spares us the terror and unknown of death, God himself tastes it and saves us through it.

Framed one way, I know that can sound sentimental. But I’m not talking about anything abstractly spiritual and “nice”. God’s salvation insists we are dragged through the grotesqueries and viscera of bodily loss, death, and decay.

In other words, you must physically, actually die in order to be saved.

That is why the ultimate reminder of our mortality is an ashen cross ground into our skin, not a euphemistic platitude to make you feel better. Our bodies are not just along for the ride; they are the vehicles within which we meet and know God–both now and into eternity.

So how will you use this body to meet God this Lent? Of what will you empty yourself that you might be filled with God? How will you remind yourself of your death that you might long for God’s life which you can only hope is waiting for you on the other side?

Keep me accountable

Here is what I am doing this year, and if you read this and know me, feel free to check in on me. (You can also explore some Lent ideas for yourself.)

• Fasting on Wednesdays and working towards adding Friday as well
• Praying through a Lent Prayerbook I helped make for my church
• Praying daily with an audio prayer app (either Hallow, Lectio 365, or Pray-As-You-Go)
• Not taking my phone with me into the bathroom or bedroom
• Turning my phone screen black-and-white for regular use
• Taking short, cold(ish) showers
• Listening to my Lent Playlist
• Reading The Passenger by Cormac McCarthy

* * * * *

I pray you have a holy Lent. God asks nothing of us that he himself did not take on. The human Jesus let himself fall into the void while still having to trust his Father to raise him. Let us strive to cultivate that sort of trust in the time we each have left. And I pray that Lent is a fruitful opportunity for you to do so.

Peace be with you.