When Light Lengthens
Tuesday February 12, 2008
Lent
Not my favorite time of year. Growing up in El Paso, I belonged to an anti-Catholic family; all I knew about Lent was that on Ash Wednesday Catholic children came from mass with dots of ash on their foreheads. “Lent” struck me as a weird word. I associated it with the bits of string in the wash.
We also used to give up things for Lent, things we never used or didn’t want. It was a joke.
Anglo-Saxon speak
Since then, I’ve learned a little about Lent. The word comes from Old English “lencten,” meaning spring, time of lengthening daylight.
Imagine so-called primitive men and women, gathered around a fire in the midwinter darkness. Comes a shaman, promising the light will return. Day by day, light grows longer, night shorter. The shaman’s promise comes true.
Before electricity, before any really effective light, when the hold of darkness on night dominated the world, the return of the light was powerful magic indeed!
Lent is time to lengthen the distance, that is create space, for the spirit to dwell. A woman’s body has space for a baby. A hospitable life has space where the spirit can abide. The Shunammite woman told her husband, “Let us make a small roof chamber with walls, and put there for [the prophet] a bed, a table, a chair, and a lamp, so that he can stay there whenever he comes to us.” 2 Kings 4:10 (NRSV)
On loan
Lent also describes something on loan. This life is lent to the Lord, we might say. But in fact, life is lent to us by the Lord. You are not your own; you are bought with a price. For that brief time we live, we live for the Lord.
Length
The idea of length suggests measurement. The soldiers building the cross measured how wide Jesus’ arm span was. Then they sawed the horizontal piece. They measured his height and chose a vertical beam to fit. They went about their task joking crudely, drinking heavily, gambling loudly-whatever it took to numb the senses and fog the brain, lest they see, hear, smell, feel the horror of their actions.
Going without during Lent enables us to see, hear, smell, and feel our lives. Going without helps us realize who, how, and why come we crucify.
But if we look at this season only from a human viewpoint, however, we’ll miss it. For, Lent is not about human attitudes and actions. It can be an I-You event, and length of the hyphen representing the relation between the human self and the eternal You can be infinite.
As long as one obtains redemption only and his self, he cannot do any good or harm to the world; he does not concern it. Only he that believes in the world achieves contact with it; and if he commits himself he also cannot remain godless. Let us love the actual world that never wishes to be annulled, but love it in all its terror, but dare to embrace it with our spirit’s arms-and our hands encounter the hands that hold it.
I and Thou, p. 143.
Roman nails did not attach Jesus to the wood of the cross. Had there been no wood at all, he still would have hanged there, because eternal will held him to the cross. Love for the world held him there.
God will go to any length to redeem the world. Lent.
Note
Martin Buber was Jewish, for many the representative Jew in the 20th century. From his words, cited above, we can’t infer he was some sort of closet Christian. Rather, we may infer that the logic of the cross is consistent with the love of the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob; and that Jesus was a Jew.