How will the voice of God speak to you this Lenten season?

What will that voice sound like? What will it say? Maybe some prophetic challenge? Or perhaps that pastoral comfort you so need?

Since the fourth century, Christians have observed the forty week days before Easter as a time for repentance, reflection and self-examination. In the Bible, forty is a number of sacred significance. The Genesis flood lasted "forty days and forty nights." Israel wandered in the wilderness for forty years. Moses spent forty days and nights on Mt. Sinai. Jonah preached to Nineveh for forty days.  And Jesus spent forty days in the desert fasting, praying, and battling satan. 

On Ash Wednesday, the priest smears ashes on my forehead to remind me of my mortality. As he does so, he recites God's words to Adam in Genesis 3:19, “for dust you are, and to dust you will return.” This somber truth stands in stark contrast to the archetypal lie that satan told Eve in Genesis 3:4, and the denial that flourishes down to our own day: "surely you will not die!"

Lent thus invites us to "remember death" — memento mori. We remember death in order to affirm life. To remember our death is to reorient our priorities. Meditating on my future mortality helps me to live more fully in the present. Lent is that time to reaffirm what matters most, and why.

I was recently reminded of the sanity of "remembering death" by an unlikely source — the Academy Awards that were held on February 24. As Oscar aficionados know, every year the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences includes a feature called "In Memoriam" that honors their colleagues who died in the previous year. If you are in the right mood, seeing the pictures of those who are no longer with us can take your breath away.

In his book The Road to Character (2015), David Brooks contrasts two ways of living and dying that compete for our allegiance: "It occurred to me that there were two sets of virtues, the résumé virtues and the eulogy virtues. The résumé virtues are the skills you bring to the marketplace. The eulogy virtues are the ones that are talked about at your funeral — whether you were kind, brave, honest or faithful. Were you capable of deep love? We all know that the eulogy virtues are more important than the résumé ones. But our culture and our educational systems spend more time teaching the skills and strategies you need for career success than the qualities you need to radiate that sort of inner light. Many of us are clearer on how to build an external career than on how to build inner character."

The radical re-orientation that Lent invites is never easy. Old habits die hard. Repentance — a change of mind leading to a change of action, is not a once for all act but a lifelong discipline. We all live complicated lives with numerous obligations and limited options. Often there is no clear path forward, just a lot complicated questions. And no matter how sincere or sustained, repentance is always imperfect, and so at death every life remains unfinished.

I recently read Mary Karr's new book of poetry called Tropic of Squalor (2018). Karr, the Peck Professor of Literature at Syracuse University and author of three best-selling memoirs, has published four previous volumes of award-winning poetry that have earned her fellowships from the Guggenheim and the National Endowment for the Arts. The "squalor" of the title refers to our messy lives that are often full of pain and suffering, but that nonetheless search for and find some numinous light in the darkness.

Two poems in particular reminded me that I shouldn't overthink my Lenten disciplines. Rather, I should listen for the voice of God in what's right in front of me. The sacred is often in the simple.

VI. Wisdom: The Voice of God

Ninety percent of what’s wrong with you
could be cured with a hot bath,
says God through the manhole covers,
but you want magic, to win
the lottery you never bought a ticket for.
(Tenderly, the monks chant,
embrace the suffering.) The voice never
panders, offers no five-year plan,
no long-term solution, no edicts from a cloudy
white beard hooked over ears.
It is small and fond and local. Don’t look for
your initials in the geese honking
overhead or to see through the glass even
darkly. It says the most obvious shit,
i.e. Put down that gun, you need a sandwich.

How God Speaks

Not with face slap or body slam
Rarely with lightening bolt or thunderclap

But in sighs and inclinations leanings
The way a baby suckles breath

The green current of the hazel wand
Curves toward the underground spring

The man in cashmere flesh does arrive
Holding out his arms he is wide

As any horizon I've ever traversed desert for
He brings thread count to my bed

Fire to my oven    With a towel tucked
In his jeans he soaps my hair

Then finger combs it dry
I massage a knot from his neck

His mouth is well water
His gaze true and from

His tongue he brings the blessed Word

I was meditating on these two poems during a recent three-day stint babysitting my grand daughter, a two-and-a-half-year-old toddler. In those three 8:00 to 6:00 days, the two of us did "nothing" more than the simple-as-the-sacred: reading Green Eggs and Ham, watching the musical Moana, hiding together under the pillows, visiting the aquarium, potty training, and dinner prep.

Right before his passion in Jerusalem, Jesus dramatized his teaching with some street theater.  He placed a little child before the disciples. He then embraced the child and said, "Whoever welcomes one of these children in my name welcomes me; and whoever welcomes me does not welcome me but the one who sent me." In Matthew's version Jesus says, "unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven."

To welcome children, and even to imitate them, is to enter God's kingdom. The sacred in the simple.

Karr's poems about the sacred voice of God in the simple things of life reminded me of the wise words of Frederick Buechner. In his memoir Now and Then (1983), Buechner encourages us to “listen to your life. Listen to what happens to you, because it is through what happens to you that God speaks. It’s in language that’s not always easy to decipher, but it’s there powerfully, memorably, unforgettably.”

NOTE: For the two poems by Mary Karr see Tropic of Squalor: Poems (New York: HarperCollins, 2018). For her three memoirs see The Liars' Club (1995), Cherry (2000), and Lit (2009), the last of which recalls her journey "from black belt sinner and lifelong agnostic to unlikely Catholic." Karr converted to Catholicism in 1996.