A long, long, long time.
Have you ever done something new for a long time?
Or gone somewhere new for a long time?
Have you noticed that when you finish or when you get back home that things are different?
Everything seems smaller, or is it that we’ve grown, become larger?
There is this thing that God’s people periodically go through, a time of displacement when things are dramatically different and when they’ve come through the other side they have changed, they have grown.
Often the number forty is associated with this time of displacement.
Forty days for Noah and the ark.
Forty years of wondering in the wilderness for Moses and the people of Israel.
Forty days of temptation for Jesus in the wilderness.
Those are some of the best known occasions in scripture. There are many others.
The forty days of Lent is a liturgical re-presentation of this time of displacement, of being between here and there, being nowhere, where we are lade bare and made vulnerable.
Is it literally forty days or forty years? Who knows?
It isn’t the quantity of the time that is the point though.
The point is the quality of the time, a long, long time when we are out of place, a time of longing and often suffering when the end is not in sight. It is in this time and state that we are prepared and changed for what comes next.
Have you ever been through one of those times?
Lingering illness can be like that.
Or being unemployed.
Sometimes just the sheer endurance of working a job that is no good but is needed because there is nothing else. Day after day after day.
Or a long time of being alone, or of being abused.
Coming through depression or addiction are times when eternity just stretches out in all directions.
Being in prison.
Being away at war.
The infinite distance between where we are and where we want to be.
Forty.
We mark that kind of time, that quality of time with the season of Lent.
We recall these times in scripture.
We attend more closely to those who are enduring this time, the poor, the sick, the suffering.
Our spiritual practices recreate in some fashion this long stretched out sense of time.
At the end is Easter.
When we get to the end of this long time we have been prepared for either baptism or for renewing our baptism.
That is what we wait forty days for, baptism or renewing our baptism, that is what we prepare for, Easter and baptism.
How do we prepare for drawing close to God?
How do we prepare to receive and renew the gift of Jesus?
It involves living in the quality of time that has been called forty, and staying there, day after day.
It isn’t about self improvement or diet.
It is about living in that raw wound that our fallen humanity is afflicted with, and resting there and waiting for the water that brings healing.
When Easter comes, when we renew our baptisms and baptize new believers, then this place will seem smaller because we will have grown larger, filled with the abundance of time.
My spiritual advice for those who truly observe Lent is to do something different that takes us out of our normal routines and relationships and that somehow addresses the pain in the world. Do it for a long, long, long time.
Afterward we are then ready to receive the gift eagerly and with great thanks.