Lent always seems to come around too fast. Each passing Easter I say to myself, "I'm going to prepare myself for Easter better next year", and next year comes and it's the same old scramble. It's not just a calendaring thing, but a head and heart thing. This year, at least, I've been jolted into a somewhat earlier preparation as CRM, my parent organisation, is sending out a devotional guide for each day of Lent. Just having these, often unread, emails filling my inbox is enough to initiate some introspection.
So what is Lent and what does one DO during Lent? I'll be upfront ... I'm no expert in Lent. As I said before, it always catches me off-guard. The most 'in-depth' explanation I can give is that it is a time of preparing ourselves for the final journey of Jesus to the cross. Lent, I believe, is always the forty days preceeding Easter. I'm not sure if it's counting Easter Friday or Easter Sunday! Forty, is of course a biblically significant number meaning "completeness", "timely", "appropraite". So the forty days helps us to be complete (in a spiritual sense) for the death and resurrection of Jesus.
For me, the cross has political overtones. For many evangelical Christians it is a pietistic event that absolves us of our sins. For me it is a way of not expiating sin so much as thumbing our collective noses at "sin" - the Domination System, violence, hatred, deciet, lies. All that seeks to take away from Other with the desire to collect, grab and amass for Self. Jesus' total refutation of that system led directly to the cross. The powers-that-be could not contain such love. They had no framework for understanding it. And so they did what they knew how to do:- they killed Him.
The Ressurection is, at the very least, a theological statement of saying the Way of Love is stronger than the Domination System. Death is not the end.
Going back to Lent, a historic, traditional ACTION during lent is to fast. That usually means food. Sometimes a specific kind of food, like meat. But in our more sophisticated age fasting has become more sophisticated. Or rather we see that food is the least of our worries and our cooptation to the Domination System is symbolised by other icons of greed. I've been thinking, "I'm not going without food, but what would be an appropriate focus for a fast in preparation for Easter Week and the Resurrection? And it finally came to me, and I hesitate to type it down as I will feel a stronger commitment to carry it out!
Mobile phones are in abundance in Cambodia. I forget the exact stats on ownership, but it's strange the person you meet WITHOUT one. One simply cannot live or work without one. And I'm not going to try! What I am considering to fast is using the 3G functionality of accessing internet and email on my phone. I'm kind of sad to do it as it's helped me get back into blogging - I can lie in bed at night and thumb away a reflection from some experience that day. It's also helped me get out some urgent news when I couldn't get internet access otherwise. But it really does mean I'm connected all the time. I've taken time off work this week and not checking email as reflexively as I breath is like, well, not breathing. It's also like just waking up and needing that fix of Cambodian coffee I wrote about earlier, but not getting it quite soon enough. I feel agitated, expectant, not yet complete.
So maybe this ties in appropriately. Lent is about completeness (the forty days symbolism, anyway). In the sense that we are ready to journey with Jesus to the cross, knowing that His death is both painful and gruesome as well as momentary, and that the victory of resurrection is on the other side. By doing without phone-enabled internet access I'm (re-)opening myself up to being complete without constant connection, and hopefully more prepared for the spiritual journey come Easter Week.
Peace,
Chris ___________________________________________________
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