Today is the first day of Lent.
Growing up in New Orleans I knew this day simply as “the day after Mardi Gras.” It was also the first day of the rest of the school year - except if you were Roman Catholic.
The Catholic kids from St. Paul’s got one more day out of school - to go to church to have ashes finger-painted on their foreheads. I remember the injustice I felt that the Presbyterians, the Methodists, the Baptist and Lutherans didn’t get Wednesday off, too. Not that I wanted smeared ashes between my eyebrows. I just wanted the more “laissez les bons temps rouler”.
Truth be told, we Protestants did not have anything to complain about. There had been plenty “good times” stretching all the way back to the excitement of Halloween in the fall. Then there was no school the week of Thanksgiving because the teachers’ local convention. Advent and Christmas followed. The Sugar Bowl on New Year’s Eve was a mere week later. And after that, every three or four years, the Super Bowl was held in New Orleans. And entwined with all this, weeks of Mardi Gras parades and carnival balls, which reached its zenith on Mardi Gras day.
For roughly four months we “let the good times roll”.
And then came Lent. As a kid, sitting at my desk until the last day of school was an unrelished reality. It is hard to just sit.
As an adult with a job and a family, I welcome times when I make time to just sit – contemplate, pray and reflect. Or read something that nourishes my soul…..that takes care of the inner man-child of God in me. No longer do I seek the stimulation of a child, but time to contemplate the meaning of the life I am living – with myself and with God, with the members of my family, friends and fellow faithful, customers, subcontractors and suppliers alike. (See 1 Corinthians 13:11.)
I feel a bit of an odd ball, though. The journal Science reported last summer that in test subjects, a quarter of women and two thirds of men would rather give themselves an electric shock than “sit and do nothing but think” for 15 minutes…… I don’t think that if they had told the participants to “pray” instead of “think” it would have made any difference.
“All the unhappiness of men,” the 17th century French philosopher Blaise Pascal noted, “arises from one simple fact: that they cannot sit quietly in their chamber.” It seems that withdrawing somewhere and within has been a problem for people for some time, no matter where they’ve grown up.
We have become “data and information” oriented people. The amount of data that is created and exchanged in a mere hour worldwide exceeds the amount of data contained in the Library of Congress – by five times! We can obtain the temperature in Antarctica in 3 seconds……but many of us do not know ourselves. Or God. Or Jesus as our Savior. Yes, we’ve read some of the Bible. But have we spent time with them?
“Be still and know that I am God” records the Psalmist.
If the next time you read any of the Gospels, pay attention about the times that Jesus slips away to pray, to be by himself, to be with God! Often early in the morning or in the evening hours. Solitude seems to be on his schedule as he went about the divine imperative to proclaiming the Good News.
Is anything you do today half as important as the responsibilities our Lord and Savior had during His brief time on earth?
Be still today and know yourself. Be still today and know God.
“For everything there is a time under heaven”, the Teacher of Ecclesiastes tells us. There is a time to “let the good times roll” as we say in South Louisiana. But there is also a time to sit still and get to know yourself and to know God as your Maker, and Jesus as your Savior and the Holy Spirit as your Sustainer.
May Lent be a time for you to learn new things about yourself and about God’s love of you in Christ.
Amen.
