It’s Holy Week 2020, and I think we can all agree this has been an especially Lenty season of Lent. When I was a kid growing up in my big, Catholic family, Lent was something that set us apart. It began with having to explain to my friends why I had a black smear of ashes on my forehead. Then, it was a steady procession of opting for fish on Fridays in the school cafeteria as a means of weekly fasting from meat, and of course, the obligatory giving up something dear for forty days–usually chocolate or gum because what kid is interested in actual painful, long-term self-denial?
For much of my adult life I walked away from the liturgical season of Lent. It represented rigidity and rules in a practice only “high church” people adhered to. What a year 2020 has been, though. Ash Wednesday fell on February 26, when cases of COVID-19 in the United States had barely reached double digits and churches openly held services, priests and pastors boldly marking participants with ashes from palms burnt the previous year. Corona was a distant storm gathering strength on the horizon.
2020, for so many of us, has brought us to the foot of the cross. You might say we’ve been given 20/20 perspective or vision.
This spring, for the season of Lent, I committed to a forty-day word fast. Nothing so austere as a complete vow of silence, but almost as challenging: being mindful and censoring words of complaint, judgement, grumbling, or criticism. Perfect timing for mind-blowing news reports, crushing anxiety, and a houseful of bored family members. Turns out words were only a drop in the Sacrifice Ocean.
A pandemic has brought Lent, unbidden, to our doorsteps. The forty-day period before Easter is meant to remind us of sacrifice and suffering, to place on our tongues a small, bitter taste of going without and denying self. Lent suggests that we, in the smallest of ways, mirror the path Jesus took, the one that began with His triumphal entry into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday.
A very large crowd spread their cloaks on the road, while others cut branches from the trees and spread them on the road. The crowds that went ahead of Him and those that followed shouted, “Hosanna to the Son of David!’ “Blessed is He who comes in the name of the Lord!” “Hosanna in the highest!”
Matthew 21:8-9, NIV
Could they have misread the situation any more? As the hooves of the donkey that carried Him crunched atop the palm-strewn road, Jesus was headed not toward the powerful kingship they expected but towards an unimagined sacrifice. In the span of a week, the world would turn upside-down, power would be reversed, and suffering, what most of us seek to avoid at all costs, would hold all the meaning in the world.
Who are we in that palm waving crowd? The faithful disciples, thinking we know what’s what, sure of the ministry of the Teacher, who casually healed two blind men on his way into the city? Celebrants, happy for a diversion, the latest talk of the town capturing our fickle attention? The donkey, doing our ordinary job on an ordinary day, oblivious of Who travels our same path, heedless that we, too, will be called to take up a cross and follow?
A few days pass on what becomes Holy Week. Dinner is served, Passover celebrated, and shifty-eyed Judas makes his move. The rest unfolds in a contradictory tumble–camaraderie and betrayal, pacifism and violence, innocence and guilt. Then, the worst:
From the sixth hour until the ninth hour darkness came over all the land…the curtain of the temple was torn in two from top to bottom. The earth shook and the rocks split.
Matthew 27: 45, 51 NIV
All was lost. Or so they thought.
So much sacrifice this season of Lent, so much giving up. We see how paltry our offerings of chocolate, wine, or screen time actually were. They lay on the altar in small measures, nowhere close to first fruits. We didn’t realize–until we did–what sacrifice and denial actually meant, what it could cost. Forced to forfeit school, jobs, human contact, health, and life itself, our vision clears.
We have 2020 vision now. Sacrifice and suffering, once more, have been brought near and given flesh. We’ve seen the nurses and doctors, faces bruised from masks. We’ve watched elderly residences ravaged by disease, and those we love lonely and afraid. Too many are gone too soon.
The season of Lent lasts forty days to reflect the number of days Jesus spent in the desert in prayer and fasting, leaning all His weight on the Father. It’s likely our current season of going without will stretch longer than that. Even so.
Lent points beyond itself. It prepares us for a rejoicing that we could never have imagined.
The tomb was empty, after all. When the sun rose that first Easter morning, the world was redeemed, reset by love.
Beyond anxiety, beyond sacrifice, beyond even death, grace waits.
Our present sufferings are not worth comparing with the glory that will be revealed in us.
Romans 8:18, NIV
On the other side, if we let it, we can carry with us the lessons: what falls away as chaff and what remains important, how a simple moment of joy can be a prayer in itself, how life is both beautiful and violent, fleeting and full of boredom.
Next year, if all goes well, once again we’ll bear the evidence of palms burned to ash on our foreheads. We’ll carry the lessons from 2020 somewhere inside us, but because we are human, living in fickle bodies with feeble minds, we’ll always need reminders. We need spiritual disciplines and seasons of sacrifice, even small ones, to call us back and back and back to the foot of the cross, to walk through suffering to the amazing grace laid bare on the other side.
Recently, I ran across a video of children discovering their shadows for the first time. Their reactions range from fascination to uncertainty to outright fear. Imagine! Here you are minding your business on a bright, sunny day and suddenly a dark figure appears who (the audacity!) mimics your every move.
Once we grasp that our shadows aren’t out to get us, and assuming they’re not the rascally runaways like the shadow of the unfortunate Peter Pan, we learn how to manipulate them. A tree outside my childhood bedroom cast long shadows on the wall in the evenings. I’d form my hands into shadow puppets of birds, which flew about its branches, landing and taking off with dramatic flutters. A talented friend of ours made comical bunnies, menacing wolves, and cunning crocs come alive with just his hands and a spotlight.
A shadow is, after all, just a projection made from light. This mind-bending photo by George Steinmetz shows an overhead image of shadows cast by a caravan of camels trekking across the desert sands. What earned this picture its status as one of 2005’s best photos of the year (National Geographic) is that if you look closely, you see the camels are actually the thin white lines. The dark recognizable camel shapes are all camel shadows. Whaaat?! Go ahead, enlarge it and see.
The light, directed just so, projects an image that creates a much greater impression than the object itself. Perspective is slippery. Had this photo been captured at a different time of day, the camel shadows would have instead been long wavy lines trailing behind the caravan. Nothing special. When the light is strongest and at its best for creating projections, it changes what we see of ourselves; it changes how we are seen by others.
The shadows we cast change over time, or maybe it’s that time changes the shadows we cast. In the morning of life, when we are unsure and unsteady, the strength of our shadow may frighten us, like the children in the video, and send us scurrying back into the comfort of shade. Later, conditioned by rejection, loss, or a shaky belief in who we are or what we can be, it’s much easier to stand in someone else’s shadow rather than risk casting our own. We don’t trust what the light might reveal, or perhaps we have our own idea what might be projected and we fear it’s more like a misshapen weasel than a swan.
Once upon a time, we might have been a child on a rocking horse or a wobbly duckling running for cover. A few along the way, parents, treasured teachers, a best friend, see us for who we are meant to be, who know what treasures lie within. They see us from above in the afternoon, and to them the rocking horse seems a galloping stallion, the duckling a darting hummingbird.
One day, we grow tall enough and brave enough to stride into the day with confidence, casting our own shadows boldly and realize what we have been all along. Armed with grace, we see what our own two hands are capable of shaping onto the wall, when we let the light in.
Now, well into my fourth decade, I feel more comfortable in my own skin than at any other time I can remember. It feels good to stretch my muscles in the sunlight, and I find myself lingering to soak up its warmth. I’m more curious than afraid of what images its rays will scatter.
We, as a matter of course, extend this powerful light-wielding vision to our children, family, friends, and even strangers. Why is it we so often withhold it from ourselves and keep our shadow casting small and timid? Standing in the shade, we throw no shadow at all. Our canvases are empty. Afraid to be just ducklings, we never see the hummingbird’s gossamer wings flickering in the sun.
The truth is we are all a bit of both: ducklings and hummingbirds, camels and thin white lines. Each comes from the other; each is lovely and full of light. Don’t wait for permission, perfection, or “the right time.” Cast your shadow, big and bold.
I am no gymnast; however, being a product of a dyed-in-the-wool Southern girl and a staunch and proper northerner sometimes stretches me into doing the splits across the Mason-Dixon Line.
It’s a scant 3 weeks til Thanksgiving, which reminds me of the strange and serious divide we used to live as kids. After driving over the river and through the woods, whichever grandparents’ house we landed at for the holiday made for an entirely different Thanksgiving.
If we headed north, up to Pennsylvania, the big bird would be full of something called stuffing, kind of a wet and sticky bread concoction that was baked inside the turkey. Getting it inside there called for sticking a hand into the bird’s empty, raw cavity and spooning it in. This is probably how the unfortunate turducken was invented: some squeamish fellow could no longer stomach the stuffing process and sent other lesser birds in one after the other until the turkey could hold no more. The northern table boasted a bowl of cranberry sauce, with round juicy cranberries chunked throughout; long, thin string beans, the French kind, and mashed potatoes and gravy.
If we headed south, to Florida, the bird would be empty, its neck would be boiling in a pot on the stove, and in the oven would be a pan of dressing, made of skillet cornbread, broth from that boiled neck, and dotted with butter. It would emerge golden and crispy on the outside and creamy on the inside, with just the right amount of sage. Cranberry sauce on the southern table would have been a matter of opening a can at both ends and schlopping it onto a plate so it maintained its can shape, which is how cranberries appear in nature. Flat, bacon-flavored green beans would have come from a jar canned from the summer garden’s bounty.
At our house, while the turkey slowly roasted, my mother would steal bits from that boiling turkey neck and eat the gizzards, too, parts my northern kin threw away. No doubt this impulse goes back to that scene in Gone With the Wind, when Scarlett O’Hara rises from the ground, her fist in the air, vowing to never be hungry again. In the South, when your Boogeyman is Sherman and the war of northern aggression, you eat everything.
Then there was grace. At the northern table, we bowed our heads, performed the sign of the cross in unison (all, except my mother), and recited together:
“Bless a Solard, For these Thigh giffs, Which we our battery sieve, From thy bow’d knee, Through Cry Solard, Amen.”
Or at least that’s how it sounded to my childish ears. Eventually, I learned it was more than gibberish: “Bless us, Oh Lord, for these Thy gifts, which we are about to receive, from Thy bounty. Through Christ, our Lord, Amen.”
At the southern table, we didn’t say grace. When my grandfather reached for the biscuits, that was the cue to dig in. Grace was my grandmother’s pride in her cooking, and the hushed quiet that fell over the table as everyone savored each bite. I half wondered, as a kid, if maybe the southern grandmother’s cooking didn’t require as much insurance, coming mostly straight from the garden, which was somehow closer to God than shelved cans from the A&P.
My own little family has now been diluted to only 1/4 northern, and our Thanksgivings are decidedly of the southern ilk. My father-in-law is the official sage tester for the dressing, taking one for the team and facing salmonella every year as he repeatedly tastes the dressing as his wife prepares it, despite the raw eggs. We say a grace that is less recitation and more wandering conversation with our Provider. When my father is there, he listens silently and finishes with his solo sign of the cross, while my decidedly un-Catholic in-laws pretend not to notice so he’s not uncomfortable.
For awhile, after my parents eloped, it was a bit like the Capulet’s and Montague’s. Their union was a convergence of two rivers, the upheaval in the middle sometimes a Bermuda Triangle. It took time for the bristling and resentment to die down. Probably all families are like that, some. We can be contemptuous and jealous, whining petty brats. Three ring circuses of dysfunction.
So when we can sit together without waving flags or firing shots and take a bite of forgiveness or swallow a bit of pride, we say grace to each other. When we can count a few blessings, appreciate who’s no longer there around the table and be grateful for who we’ve still got, even though a little bit of their crazy is showing, grace abounds. They’re silently thinking the same about you (*wink, wink*).
If you can pause for a moment of gratitude before the shoveling ensues, savor it. Savor your abundance of family and food. Laugh out loud in delight if you need to at the patchwork of loopy, messy souls that have your back, some of whom seem to be trying to be hysterical for a living. God bless ’em. Amazing grace.
Three days in a row, I have skipped out to the barn to feed the chickens and make sure the horse gets his carrot, and there, at the end of the barn, attached to the gate, I have run into a spider web spanning the entire barn aisle. Three days in a row, I have shrieked, flailed, and desperately smacked my clothing and whipped my hair, hoping to dislodge the eight-legged villainous insect that was probably creeping down my collar to bite me in the spine.
The first day, I was horrified. The second day, I was horrified and a bit annoyed that the giant web had been reconstructed. By the third day, I was horrified, annoyed at the spider, and kicking myself for my lack of memory. But today! Today I was prepared and armed with a rolled up newspaper, my sword which I brandished as I took halting steps towards the gate exit. And of course, today the spiderweb was gone. Apparently the spider was just as annoyed with me as I was with it and chose to relocate.
Anyone watching would have thought I’d gone mad. Step. Wave newspaper wildly in front of me. Step. Wave paper to the left and above head. Step, duck down. Wave paper to the right, squinting up into the shadowed corners. Those silky filaments can be so transparent in the right light. (I could take this as an indication that I might need glasses, but just yet I refuse to submit to the beckoning crook of Age’s finger.)
But anyone watching would not have known about the first two days I’d spent picking dead flies out of my hair. Or the time I went out to the back deck to water the plants and found a suspiciously large lump in the middle of an enormous spiderweb between the roof and deck railings. Curious, I inspected and was heartbroken to find the thin thread of a hummingbird’s beak poking out from its sticky cocoon. A terrorist spider was preying on the most innocent and fragile of creatures! After angrily ripping down its web, I lay awake at night thinking about how big a spider would have to be to eat an entire bird.
So that’s the thing. We all have our particular spiderwebs, things we’ve encountered and hit head on that make us flail around like maniacs on occasion. Our reaction to our spiderwebs might make those walking along beside us look at us with concern. They can’t feel the gossamer threads; they aren’t imagining the bird-eating spiders.
One of the great gifts of this messy, crooked, scratch-and-dent life we get to live is the privilege of showing up for each other. What a wonder if we can look at someone swatting and ducking at their personal spiderwebs and, even though invisible to us, we can come alongside and nod knowingly, yeah, me, too. Me, too. Next time it will be us, when life is swell and we’re whistling along, when we run right out into life’s traffic and freeze as the proverbial bus bears down.
When my children were very small, occasionally their imaginations would invent scary things in the night that would make sleep impossible. After songs and water and reassurances, the one thing that would usually get them to sleep was Angel Wings. I’d spread one of their blankets out underneath them and they’d lie in the middle. As I folded and tucked each side of the blanket around them, I’d tell them these were angel wings protecting them from all the Scaries.
The monsters under the bed when we are children morph into nasty spiderwebs when when we are grown. We call it being practical or being a realist and give it nice names, making it into a pet that slinks around our ankles with a sly grin, when really we are just getting cozy with fear. Instead of trying something new, heeding an inward call, taking a risk on ourselves, our talents, or our heart’s desires, we hang back, convinced there might be spiderwebs ahead, convinced that we will not have what it takes to brush them aside.
Too often, we go through life running from something that isn’t after us.
Ghosts. Spiderwebs hanging tattered and dusty, the spider long gone. All that hair-whipping and arm waving wasted energy because the spider had moved on long ago. We only imagined its sticky threads wrapping us in the snare of its cocoon, when all along we had been free to run and dance.
I hardly ever read comments on internet posts. I’m usually stunned by the hatred and nastiness people seem to take pleasure in at others’ expense. Don’t be someone else’s spiderweb. Don’t make the comment that plants a seed of fear and ugly. Don’t voice the judgement that says very little about the person you speak of and volumes about you.
We can all be someone else’s angel wings, wrapping each other in grace. We can all be a hand to hold, sweepers of spiderwebs, real and imagined. Is there anything sweeter? As George Eliot said, “What do we live for, if it is not to make life less difficult for each other?”
Years ago, my young niece picked my sister’s wedding ring from the top of her dresser and headed across the street to the sandlot to play Buried Treasure. Her optimistic, hopeful little self thought this a grand idea. As the game wore on and her attention drifted, eventually the buried and reburied ring could no longer be unearthed. The day’s treasure stayed lost. (Also lost: my sister’s temper and my niece’s privilege of going outside.)
I’m a loser. I’m constantly losing my keys, glasses, phone, the remote. I have more than once lost my car in a parking lot. I lose my way. Before GPS, it would stress me out to drive even into our town’s small square because I would inevitably take a wrong turn. I lose my temper, I lose track, I lose my train of thought, but sadly, rarely my appetite or weight. On occasion, I’ve lost sleep, sanity, wits, and most of my marbles. Somewhere along the way, I lost my flexibility, youth, virginity, and solid memory, not necessarily in that order.
My kids lose things too. They’ve lost teeth, ball games, earphones, shoes, textbooks, glasses, retainers. Big things: confidence, innocence, friends, judgement, freedoms and privileges. We lost an inner tube at the ocean once, watched helplessly as it floated away with the rip tide, imagined it beaching itself someday in Australia, providing a brief rest stop for seagulls along its way.
We are a nation of losers. I read recently that last year the TSA pocketed $675,000 in lost loose coins from airport security. There’s a crazy place in Scottsboro, Alabama called the Unclaimed Baggage Center. It’s like a constant, dynamic warehouse-sized yard sale of the contents from people’s lost luggage. You can get anything there, from electronics to wedding dresses to oriental rugs people have shipped–and lost. It’s kind of a voyeuristic experience, sifting through someone else’s belongings to find fascinating objects. I feel bad buying things, imagining somewhere a bereft and naked bride weeps while strangers try on her gown in a fitting room in Alabama.
We can’t hold onto anything. We lose sunglasses and cameras at amusement parks. We lose our lunches after riding the rides. We lose sobriety, opportunities, jobs, hair, faith, hope. We lose touch with friends and family and eventually, inevitably, we lose parents, friends, spouses. If we let it, our whole lives can seem like nothing more than a series of losses from beginning to end.
I used to create scavenger hunts for my kids with rhyming clues. It didn’t matter what they were searching for, a pack of gum or small toy. Excited by the hunt, they loved to race each other around the house from clue to clue. Somewhere along the way, we eventually stopped this game, and I wonder if they even remember that we did it at all. When is it that we stop being delighted by what’s next? Somehow a gradual film slides over us, dimming the light of discovery and optimism. We grow from expectant, wide-eyed children where everything is magical to jaded, cynical grumps waiting for the other shoe to fall.
When my kid brother was around two years old, our family spent a day at Disney World. For weeks, my parents had been trying get him to give up his pacifier (“binky”). If they hid it, he’d hunt through the house like a bloodhound. That day at Disney, my father carted my brother around on his shoulders so he could see the costumed characters. Goofy walked up and mimed for the binky. When my brother wasn’t forthcoming, Goofy plucked it from his mouth, waved, and was swallowed by the crowd. It was a tense moment of truth for my parents. Because of this sadistic giant dog, would they now be subject to hours of wailing in a crowded amusement park? Luckily for them, it went the other way. My brother considered the loss for a brief moment, and then something in him relaxed. Apparently, when Goofy makes off with your pacifier, resistance is futile and it’s time to give it up. Parents of toddlers take note.
The point is, the day was so filled with awaiting magic that the loss of his favorite object could be overlooked. Something great was just around the corner and he couldn’t waste time grousing. He had morphed from a loser to a finder.
Obviously, every day is not a trip to Disney World. Every loss is not a toddler’s binky. Some days you just want to pull the covers over your head and take refuge in chocolate. I get it: some losses shake you to the pit of your soul and will be carried and mourned until your last breath. But sometimes we make every inconvenience, every change of plans, lost thing, or blip on the radar into The Way Things Are And Will Forever Be Amen. It changes us into losing losers instead of expectant finders. Negative grimacers clutching and clinging onto every bit of control as if somehow our scrabbling could prevent any future losses. Hey, don’t get me wrong. I love control. Control is my favorite! But chasing it is as futile as Goofy absconding with your kid brother’s binky. Most things, really almost everything, I’ve realized, is beyond my control. Way beyond. Except, ironically, my reaction to being a loser.
If I’m holding with white knuckles to those things I’ve lost, or am afraid of losing, my hands are too full to accept all the other great gifts waiting for me.
I’ve been a losing loser from day one. We all have. The trick is remembering that, like my niece, we are all also in a scavenger hunt for that buried treasure. Clues are everywhere. Underneath our lost loser selves we are, if we allow ourselves to be, finders. Right next to the lost luggage, keys, and wedding rings are mango gelato, holding hands, and tiny baby deer along the roadside. We can find strength, faith, and the good in others. If we look, we can find grace, coating everything like a fine dew, an abundant, amazing grace that can gently nudge us from discouraged griping into joy and wonder. Treasure indeed, and finder’s keeper’s.
e someone else’s spiderweb. Don’t make the comment that plants a seed of fear and ugly. Don’t voice the judgement that says very little about the person you speak of and volumes about you.