A Meditation: Lenten Fast before Easter Feast

Have you ever been incredibly happy, but self-awareness pulled you out of the moment, preventing you from fully enjoying it because it felt too good to be real?

Have you ever been sad enough, or in enough pain, you wished you could die?

The season of Lent is approaching, and I’ve been mulling over this topic because I’m surrounded by examples of both joy and suffering on all sides. Friends confide in me their trauma, their every-day frustrations, their questions and doubts. They share news about babies, exciting job opportunities, treasured experiences of divine grace and provision. This world is a multi-color work of art, with warm and cool shades intermingling. And this is the picture Lent shows us.

My own life is a microcosm of the same pattern—I’m probably the happiest, most motivated, most fulfilled I’ve been in my life. Yet certain hardships remain familiar, unwelcome companions. My chronic pain and disabilities haven’t gone away, neither have the various pressure points in my relationships disappeared. Decades have passed, and yet I struggle with the same weaknesses and temptations as my younger self.

Jesus’ journey from the loud, triumphal entry into Jerusalem to the silent, seeming-defeat of the grave follows this pattern too. Victory gives way to loss, joy to pain, life to death. Hidden within all of it, there’s a larger narrative woven in the way this world works. Lent is a season which does more than remind us of a story, the Easter story. Lent tills up our hard-packed hearts, it erodes our tendency to respond to the death all around us with calloused acceptance, and it invites us to feel the wrongness of suffering. Lent invites us to mourn our losses, and hope for something more.

There’s a valuable perspective to uncover here. The world is beautiful, yet rife with death and decay. If there’s a purpose to this dichotomy, it’s this—somehow, our pain can make us better. Better friends, better spouses, better parents, better strangers, better versions of ourselves.

Does that sound like a self-improvement scheme? Aren’t there plenty of examples of people whose grief hardened them, whose addictions broke them, whose despair robbed them of life? How can pain make anything better?

Pain alone isn’t the antidote to stiff-necked stagnation. But neither is pain merely a side effect of being stuck in a broken world. I think we rob ourselves of a theological richness when we assume our suffering is like a technical difficulty God wants us to bear with while he scrambles in the background to get us through. There’s intent, and a divine purpose, hidden within the hardships we bear, especially the hardships which accompany us all our lives. God is at work, mysteriously, in the places we least expect to find him.

I hold fast to this hope because, each year, an Easter feast follows a Lenten fast.

I’m reminded, year after year, of the greater feast to come. In this world, we experience a cycle of famine and plenty, then famine again. Easter and Lent come hand in hand to offer a meal of truth—spiritual food which touches our lips and seeps down deep, all the way to our innermost parts, as the psalmist would say.

Bitter flavors of illness, grief, chronic pain, and eventually, death, are no longer like poison to us—they become a palate cleanser, preparing us for the magnificent feast to come. A feast Jesus himself is waiting, full of hunger, to share with us as soon as we gather at his table and the hour of reunion arrives.

I often wonder what kind of perspective we’ll have at that point. Maybe this life will feel like dentist visits of childhood—something we know was unpleasant, but don’t really remember clearly. Or maybe it’ll be more like the bittersweet remembrance of childbirth—something incredibly traumatic, but also full of purpose and beauty. When the whole story is taken into account and the moment lies years behind us, we recall the difficulty, but wouldn’t trade that experience for anything, because of what the pain brought. I imagine we will feel something akin to how Christ Jesus reflects on his final week, and the long, painful journey of his cross.