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"Practicing for Lent"
The Rev. Jan Kwiatkowski
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I am one of those goofy people who really likes blizzards. And I got my wish this week, we had a blizzard. One of the reasons I like blizzards or many of the reasons I like blizzards is that for me blizzards are just an amazing combination of weather and all of the elements in weather, in science that it takes to put a blizzard together. And then you live through the blizzard and there is the wind, and the sleet, and the snow and sometimes there is rain and thunder and lightening it is like the whole gambit of weather in a very short amount of time. And I’m goofy enough to enjoy that anticipatory flurry of getting ready, of making sure we have all the basis so if we have to hunker down for a day or two we’ve got everything we needed. And I text message my husband the grocery list so that he could pick up the basiscs. My sons that are still at home I d id the mom thing and made sure they had their mittens and enough stuff in the car to keep them warm and all those kinds of things. And I’m also goofy enough to like the challenge of driving in a blizzard unless it gets really dangerous and then I’m sensible enough to go home but I like the challenge of that woman against the elements kind of thing.
So I got my wish and Thursday we got to hunker down and stay home, I had taken some work with me from St. Christopher’s and had a lot of reading to do and it was a perfect day to do that and in our neighborhood, we are one of the lowest priority neighborhoods in Milwaukee because we live up on the far northwest side, so the plows didn’t come until about 9:30 that evening. Well, about 2:30, 3:00 in the afternoon when we are all getting pretty squirrly from being at home together. We’re not normally at home together. One of the fun things we have learned to do after 27 years of living in this neighborhood is make fun of the people who are trying to drive up the hill that we live on. We’ve lived in our neighborhood for 27 years and this hill, we’re about 2/3 of the way down the hill and the hill that we live in is really a gently deceiving slope and after 27 years of driving through rain and sleet and snow and ice and blizzard and all of that, we really have a pretty good idea of how to drive up this hill. How to either just gun it out of the driveway and go for it or how far we need to back down the hill before we go up the hill, which houses are the critical houses we have to get past in order to make it up the hill. And also how to calculate that when we gun it, that no one, or hope, no one is going to get in our way. So we can be pretty content in ourselves that way or snobby in ourselves that way. So on Thursday afternoon we are watching people trying to get up this hill. And we’re sitting there going, “Come on honey, just a little bit more to get over that.” or “No, you have to back down further than that! Further, go further, you’ve gotta go further. You’ve got to go further.” And we place small bets on if this person is going to make it or not. We’re not totally cruel about it because if someone does not make it the neighbors do come out and help people or push them out of where they have gotten stuck. This year we actually had seven school buses and a snowplow get stuck so it was pretty bad this year. What was different though was that for the first time in a very long time every driver in my house got stuck in the subdivision. Every driver in the house got stuck. Except for me, but when I though I was home free (Dennis and the boys were watching in the window because we call to let each other know we are close to home) I thought I was home free and I was the only one who didn’t get stuck and I slid into the driveway, made one tiny miscalculation and slid in on a really bad angle in front of everybody. So there was a lot of joking about men and women drivers and all that kind of thing. But what I thought about when we got home about this snow storm and about this blizzard was thinking about all these people in the subdivision for a long time and the new drivers in the subdivision and strangers who were driving the school bus and snow plow and all of that. And I thought we really have a lot of things in common. The blizzard put us on an even playing field or equal driving field. It really didn’t matter if we had a tiny sort of winter beater car like a lot of the kids have, and SUV or a school bus we all had places where we got stuck or we slid off the path. We all really needed each other, it didn’t matter if we were from the neighborhood or if we had been in the neighborhood a long time or if we were complete strangers in the neighborhood we needed each other to get through this, to get where we were going. And ultimately we were on the same road.
I though about that, I’m not normally a person that looks for some big correlations between an event and a liturgical season, but it occurred to me this year that it is awfully interesting that the first two days of lent and this blizzard would coincide time wise. And I thought about Lent in terms of a bigger season, the blizzard forced us all to slow down and reflect, certainly afterwards or certainly think about how we all needed each other. How we were all in this situation together and it didn’t matter where we came from or what our experience was, how fast or slow we were driving on the road, we all needed each other. It didn’t matter if we were rich or poor or what kind of car we were driving, we all needed each other and those relationships were key during these couple of hours of the blizzard. And I think that is what it is about Lent. One thing we learn in Lent is that relationships are key in Lent. We learn to practice our relationships as much as we learn to practice driving. And for those of us that had driven up this hill for 27 years one of the things we learned is that you can never have enough practice, whether it is driving or whether its working out our relationships. We can never have enough practice; it is a lifelong kind of thing.
In Lent we come again to realize that we are hunger, we are all trying to get to some place, we are all trying to get to fill our hunger for God. That’s what drives I believe the human soul, is that we’re hungry for God. And we try to fill that hunger with all kinds of things and you all know what kinds of things those are. In Lent we take time to step back and go back the core of what’s really driving us. And that core is our hunger for God. Our relationship for God and our relationship for God and how much God loves us and how much we are forgiven, our capacity to heal and to be healed is found in our relationships with others. And Lent is a time that calls us, that challenges us and almost forces us to slow down, much like we have to slow down in a blizzard and rely on each other’s relationships even for a short time. Look at how we are all ultimately on the same road towards wholeness, towards the fullness of who we are as human beings. We are all on that same path; we are all in that together, we need each other. At minimum, we need to be aware that we are all on this road together so we don’t hurt each other or have some sort of accident.
During Lent we often take up some type of practice so we become more aware of these things we do that either hurt or get in the way of our relationship with God or get in the way of our relationship with others. We often take on maybe it’s giving up chocolate or coffee or getting up early to exercise or maybe we take on a particular prayer discipline. We set aside time to read scripture or read a meditative book or spend more time with a spouse or something like that. I wonder if Lent isn’t so much about the particular practices but if Lent isn’t more about practicing the season of Lent our whole life. Just as we have to practice driving up that hill in our house every single year and we think we’ve got it down it became clear that we don’t have that, I don’t have that. And I thought about that in terms of Lent. I don’t know about you but I find myself doing the same two or three practices working on the same two or three issues every Lent and I think I’ve gained some spiritual maturity and all those things and then Lent comes around again and I find myself practicing the same thing again. I find that I have to go back down the hill and start all over again. And maybe it’s because I have had some sort of accident or mishap or maybe someone has decided to tell me that, “No honey, you really need to back down the hill.” And maybe somebody needs to push me up the hill and I think that’s what happens in Lent. It’s our going back every year and looking at practicing and realizing that we are human. Realizing that we have sinned and fallen short, realizing that we need each other on this journey towards what fills our heart, towards the God that fills our heart and realizing that every year it’s okay if we go back down the hill and start all over again. The important thing is that we do go back down the hill and start all over again that we help push each other out, that we do slow each other down and say, “Wait a minute, you need to think about some things here.” That’s what this Christian road is all about, that’s what this Lenten journey is all about.
The other thing I was thinking about was practicing those same things every couple of years is that maybe that’s a good thing. Maybe it’s a good thing that I have to, that we have to practice those same things over the years because what that teaches us is that we cannot achieve wholeness, the wholeness that God wants for us on our own. We are completely dependant on God and on God through each other. So maybe that’s a good thing that we practice the same thing over and over again. One thing I am comforted by and strengthened by and will hope that you are too is that when we ‘re out there in the blizzard world we sometimes feel like we have to control everything and do it all our self and that practice year after year of driving in the blizzard it kind of gets there. We can do that and we get tired of it. In Lent every year in the Christian journey even though we get tired we have company with us. We are never alone on this journey and God is the one who holds this road, who holds the journey, who holds all of this, the snowstorm, Lent and all of us. God holds it together, God redeems it and God loves it. So I invite you into whatever your practice of Lent is to enjoy that to enjoy the journey to come along all together. Amen.
