Lent is our Dry Dock: A Reflection from the Rector on Lent for 2025
You are on a ship. The ship is sailing cargo back and forth across the North Atlantic. For months now, you've seen more than usual water in the bilge, slopping and frothy grey. When you wake up in the middle of the night, you hear the pumps churning, their pitch getting higher and their thrum louder. And each time you pitch into a storm, you hear the hull screech just a little bit more as the metal twists and pulls, and twists again.
You can't fix this ship at sea. You have to go into a dry dock, those marvelous canals where the water is drained out, and the ship is fully exposed so the crew can fully repair its hull and replace the burned-out pumps.
Part of being human, growing up shaped by a fallen world, is that the ships we call our 'selves' are not built entirely right. They are built on false assumptions. They are not built on our faith, on God’s unconditional love or God's victory or the promise of resurrection. We thus look for love, for self-worth, for a sense of being OK, in all the wrong places and we become dependent on these other. worldly things for what God alone can give. All this comes to a head when we attempt to live, to sail, a Christian life in the storms of life. After a while out at metaphorical sea, these selves begin to show their strain. The design flaws turn small errors into major problems. We discover that what we call our above-water ‘selves' break down under the strain of trying to be Christian without being built from a hull and keel of Christian faith. We need some serious rebuilding.
Lent is our dry dock. Lent is our time for renewal and repair and opening our lives to be shaped by our faith and God's purpose. And it's not like we have to drop everything and go away to a ethereal spiritual retreat where an astounding teacher is going to fix us. That's not Lent. Rather, the practice of Lent is to take these 40 days (six and a half weeks from Ash Wednesday to Easter, not counting Sundays) and to set aside time and energy every day for new spiritual practice. The Lenten Exhortation in the Book of Common Prayer (p. 264-265) specifies these practices: self-examination and repentance...prayer, fasting, and self-denial, and meditating on God's Holy Word.
Self-examination and repentance: without shaming ourselves, we decide to be actively curious about our sins and wounds, how they constrain our freedom and affect our relationship, and who offer these to God, asking for help to change
Fasting and self denial: We are to deny ourselves the pleasures and distractions that make any real engagement with ourselves harder. Most of us could benefit, spiritually, from reducing our intake of expensive foods and drink, restricting our overall purchasing to essentials, and drastically reducing the media entertainments, screen time, and anxious checking of email. Instead, we choose more wholesome ways of loving ourselves and those close to us - like walks, talks, sitting in silence and reading good books. For many the most powerful self-denial is to deny ourselves the importance of being in a rush. We choose rather go live slowly.
Prayer, meditation, and reading Holy Scripture: We are to engage with Scripture in a way that opens our hearts anew both to ourselves, our plight and need, and God's unconditioned care and call. We do not pray and meditate and ponder Scripture to figure things out or get information, but to open and allow ourselves to be moved and formed by the Holy Spirit.
There is much happening in our church, society, and community right now, and many of us are being moved to make an active response. This is good and wholesome. But at the same time, Lent asks, What are the selves we are going to bring to those responses? How resilient are they going to be when storms come? How rooted are they in God, in our faith, in the resurrection of Jesus? How capable are these selves of sustaining compassion and receiving criticism? Lent does not ask us to choose between the active life, responding to God, and retreating to grow spiritually. Rather, it asks us to set aside some time daily for renewed spiritual practices while still engaging in our lives. That is the magic of Lent.
In order to support us in our desire to engage our Lenten Practices, I am going to invite the whole parish to work through a book of Lent devotions created by the Irish Jesuits, Sacred Space for Lent 2025. Our Sunday Forums, when free of other topics, will invite us to pray with some of the material from this book, and to talk openly about our concerns and questions, our challenges and blessings.
God bless us all as we journey with Jesus to Jerusalem this Lent, making space for God to work with us, day by day, in repentance, self-denial, prayer, and meditation.