Lent Halftime Report

6 March^, 2019 – TGV Paris-Geneva

Today is Ash Wednesday, and I didn’t have time to go to church.  Not that I’ve ever gone to church on Ash Wednesday before, but I am trying to take Lent a little more seriously these days.  This year I’ve decided to give up sugar – as in so-called “added” sugar, so fruit is okay, but pain au chocolat is not.  Granted, 12 hours without sugar is not anything to congratulate oneself about, and today I was in our office on Rue de La Boetie, where the cheese cart in the canteen is a helpful distraction.  Nonetheless, the day was long and mentally tiring, and right now I would typically find myself lashing into a cookie or an EAT NATURAL bar or something. Richard Rohr writes some good stuff about the importance of aligning heart, mind and body when it comes to contemplation.      

16 March 2019 – GVAàFRA

Starting a 10-day trip to the US, which will bring me to Boston for a bunch of meetings, then to Las Vegas next week for three days.  A clear, bright morning in Geneva, almost empty going through security, and I found a smooth, easy rhythm, tapping the smiley-face button to indicate my satisfaction with things.  This feeling likely won’t last long, as the rest of the week will be busy and stressful and will not lend itself willingly to reflection and quiet.

On that note, I am trying to use this trip to get more into Lent study and reflection.  I am keeping with my sugar abstinence, which Lydia points out is kind of hypocritical since I eat roughly my own weight in dates every day, but still I think it does its job of making me more acutely aware of my own desire.  I imagine “temptation” is the proper word here; that is indeed the word used in my Lent study guide, which comes courtesy of something called Churches Together in Britain and Ireland.  Week 1 focuses on Luke 4, and the forty days in the wilderness and the temptation of Jesus.  I noticed for the first time this morning that the real drama in those passages comes at the end of the forty days, when Satan shows up to tempt JC.  To draw a weak parallel to my business travels, it’s relatively easy to stay disciplined about things when you’re breezing through GVA airport security on day one; the harder part is at the end of a trip like this, when all the fatigue has accumulated and your willpower has eroded and you flick mindlessly through your phone as you wait for your connecting flight home.

Isn’t this essential to what being a Christian is all about?  Truly living by choosing the good and deep and true, instead of succumbing to baser desires (and in so doing living a life that is more like death)?  I did slog through all of Augustine’s Confessions last year, so I should know something about this.  To quote Nasim Taleb (quoting Procrustes): “Love without sacrifice is theft.  This applies to any form of love, particularly the love of God.”

20 March 2019 – Cambridge, MA

Up early with jet lag and managed to get myself down to the gym at least to run a little.  One always feels better. 

A study question for this week is “Where and when did God manage to get your attention?”  This is preceded by a story about a thunderstorm and some lines about the “power and intensity of nature” as a sign of God’s presence.  Today, I read Genesis 15, when God tells Abraham that he will have as many descendants as stars in the sky, etc.  While reading it in my (highly recommended) Olive Tree bible study app, I found a note I had written, probably several years ago now, at Gn 15:12 (“…And behold, dreadful and great darkness came upon him.”).  My note said, “Is darkness necessary for light/God to appear?” 

This got me thinking about my own faith, which, to tell you the truth, has felt kind of forced and lukewarm lately.  Over the past months, I haven’t felt that strong emotive pull, while at church or anywhere else, that I felt, say, when I was reading the Bible deeply for the first time, or when I started to go to church regularly several years ago.  Maybe this is because things are relatively stable and comfortable for me at the moment (ed: abrupt scraping sound as the writer falls out of his chair to touch all the visible wood in the apartment).  Yeah, my job is stressful and there’s some uncertainty about the future, but I don’t feel any heavy darkness.  This was the exact word that I used to describe that feeling I would have, around the time my marriage was falling apart, when I would wake up in the morning and feel this heavy and intense sense of remorse, dread, fear: darkness.  Back in Genesis 15, God doesn’t come down and hit Abraham with the heavy pyrotechnics right off the bat.  He waits for a “dreadful and great darkness” to fall upon him, and only in the midst of that darkness does He make His covenant with Abraham.  So, perhaps God reveals Himself to us only (or most powerfully) when darkness falls.  One of our jobs, especially during Lent, is to at least be conscious of this, and perhaps learn keep an eye out for Him even when light is shining.  And (touching wood again) to be mindful that darkness is never that far away.

21 March 2019 – Cambridge, MA

In a hurry this morning between the gym and meetings.  Just time to read Psalm 27, and a great line in verse 13: “I believe that I shall look upon the goodness of the Lord in the land of the living.”  Not bad for a one-line philosophy, and a good, slightly cheeky, answer to the question, “What do you believe in?”  It’s always tough to parse the words too closely when you’re dealing with a translation, but I find the fact that it specifies “in the land of the living” interesting: this is not about just waiting for a kingdom of heaven later on, it’s about appreciating and glorifying God here, in this life, in the land of the living.  And rhythmically, it forms a catchy heptameter up until “Lord” (if you combine “I” and the first syllable of “beLIEVE” into one beat).   Right on.

22 March 2019 – Cambridge, MA

Friday morning, up early with a couple of free hours before work, so I do some laundry and have breakfast and read and write a little.  Today was the story of the Transfiguration (Luke 9:28), and again (as in Genesis 15, see above), God arrives on the scene only after darkness falls and the three disciples are “heavy with sleep.”  Later we hear the voice of God, but not before a cloud comes and overshadows them.  The bit at the end, when Moses and Elijah step off stage, and God seems to single out Jesus above the other two, feels like it was tacked on later by someone who really wanted to make a point.  Of course this is a pretty important point for Christians: the other two were just prophets, while JC was God incarnate.  But then again nowhere in this passage does God say anything like “never mind about all that stuff Moses said;” only, “This is my son…listen to him!”

I also pause a bit at the very end, when Peter, John, and James come down from the mountain and don’t tell anyone what they’ve seen.  Why not?  There were three of them after all, so it’s not like later on (Luke 22) when a solitary Peter, trying to save his own skin, denies knowing Jesus.  And evidently at some point later they did tell someone about what happened on the mountain, or else we wouldn’t be reading about it in Luke’s gospel.  This could be a message about our own fearfulness, and our reluctance, even after seeing glowing visions and hearing the voice of the Big Man himself, to put ourselves out there and seem like we’re crazy or blasphemous. 

23 March 2019 – Cambridge, MA

I went to Kendall Square Cinema last night and saw a German film called Transit.  The backdrop was the spread of Nazism – people were asked for their papers a lot, and characters made a few hushed references to “cleansings” – but it was shot in the present day, mostly in Marseilles, as German dissidents of various stripes tried to get the hell out of Europe.  The filmmakers didn’t try to modernize it per se: there were no cell phones, everything is done on paper, the passage out of Marseilles is all by boat, etc.  More like they might have thought about making it faithful to 1944, when Anna Segher wrote it, but then decided to spare themselves the expense and hassle of rounding up a bunch of old cars and fedoras.  Many people spoke German when you didn’t expect them to – like at the Mexican Consul in Marseilles.  Anyway, the movie was a bit better in theory (“Casablanca meets Kafka” said Anthony Lane in the New Yorker) than in practice. 

On the way home, I stopped by the Smokehouse, where I ate pulled pork and coleslaw and drank beer while watching both the NCAA basketball tournament and the NCAA wrestling championships simultaneously on two flat screens next to each other on the wall opposite.  With TVs on practically every open wall space, American restaurants are always handy for people who are eating alone, or who would rather look at something other than the people with whom they are eating.

This morning we read Isaiah 55 and Psalm 63.  Some nice imagery in both around feeling a physical desire for God: “My soul thirsts for you; my flesh faints for you” (Ps 63:1).  Again the theme of resisting earthly desires for the transcendent, and in this case, cleverly picking up the weapons of the enemy, so to speak. 

25 March 2019 – Cambridge, MA

Back from a not-too-exhausting orangetheory workout on a Monday morning.  Coffee, grapefruit, toast with peanut butter.  Although I just noticed that the bread has freaking sugar in it, even though it’s “whole wheat” from Whole Foods.  The tricks that marketers play.  I am allowing myself to have some anyway, as I feel like I need some carbohydrates after the gym, and therefore this is not about satisfying a craving for sweets.  This may be a flimsy rationale, but maybe it raises an interesting question: does intent matter when it comes to sin?  Maybe an extreme example would be someone who kills in a war, or in self-defense, as having different “intent” than someone who murders for money, or hatred, or a more “selfish” motive?  Or someone who steals to feed his family?  It’s tough to think of too many examples here.  JC doesn’t split hairs in today’s reading (Luke 13:6-9) and offers only two choices: repent or perish. 

A short but enjoyable weekend with my daughters.  We ate cordon bleu and Brussels sprouts with bacon and rice pilaf, and we played hearts and Not Alone.  On Sunday, breakfast at Friendly Toast and Ellie’s soccer tournament, and a trip to the movie theater, and Chinese food.  Boys send Sarah messages over Snapchat.   

26 March 2019 – Cambridge, MA

Today’s we covered the “Jesus Prayer,” which is not too hard to remember because it’s only one line: “Lord Jesus Christ Son of God, have mercy on me as a sinner.”  There was also link to something called orthodoxprayer.org, which has a detailed analysis of the Jesus Prayer.  It talks about how it helps “focus our mind exclusively on God with no other thought occupying our mind but the thought of God.”  This gets my head nodding, as I’ve been thinking lately about how in a certain way Christianity and Buddhism are two sides of the same coin (or maybe even the same side).  This website itself talks about prayer as a discipline, “to help our soul gain control over our overactive brains and create stillness…”; Thomas Merton’s Seeds of Contemplation and Robert Wright’s Why Buddhism Is True  both cover the same territory.  I know Merton (a Trappist monk) has written extensively about Buddhism itself, which I need to get around to reading one of these days.

And yet, the last section on the orthodoxprayer.org page, there’s a whole section called: “Jesus Prayer Is Not a Form of Eastern Meditation.”  I don’t have time to explore this all in detail right now, but some of it I disagree with (especially the insistence of Buddhism espousing an “impersonal God”) and some of it I don’t (stuff about nothingness).