The Slow Way: Lent As Checking Our Spiritual Pulse

Lent has zero extra powers. It is simply a season that has already been set aside for us to participate in that movement of destabilization and vulnerability--an entry point into spiritual practices.

for the frantic strivers, serial doers, and weary achievers

There’s an image of Scott Erickson’s that’s been on my mind this week. It’s simply called “Pulse,” and it’s an illustration of a left hand checking the pulse on its right wrist. Light shoots out of the wrist as a gold starburst of God’s presence. It’s a simple idea, that we can check our own spiritual pulse, that we can take responsibility for our connection to ourselves and to the Divine.

This, I believe, is the gift of Lent, which our spiritual ancestors gave us when the Church calendar was created over the course of hundreds of years. Lent exists, not to be a moment of forced piety, or an attempt at sacrificing enough to please an angry deity. It is not an obligation, or even a yearly tradition. Lent is an invitation to check our pulse.

God doesn’t need Lent. There’s no commandment in scripture to follow a particular sacred calendar. Lent has no foundation in any scriptural stories. All time is sacred to the Holy One so Lent doesn’t exist for God.

It’s for us. Humans need shared sacred moments, spaces, and calendar days. What Lent provides is a season in each year where we’re invited to pause, to check our spiritual pulse, to ask the Holy Spirit what is most needed, and listen for whatever next right thing God is inviting us to move toward.

It’s a religious ritual, and just like any religious ritual, Lent can easily become something surface level, a pretense. We can follow the rules of the season, choosing a way to fast, a thing to add. We can read a book for forty days. We can appear to make personal sacrifices. But there’s nothing magical about practicing Lent, any more than the rest of the Christian calendar is magical.

What makes Lent powerful is its insistence on setting aside time in our lives to take our individual and collective spiritual pulse. What makes Lent powerful is that it invites us to make a choice toward honesty with God and ourselves, a choice to get solemn about what we discover in our core, and live that restraint in the ways we spend our time, in the space we create in our lives, in the practices we pour into the space we’ve opened up.

The season of Lent is a forty day invitation to go inward. To move from the edges of our lives to the center of us, the places we most often choose to avoid. It’s a moment to ask ourselves: Why do we do what we do? What do we hide from others? What do we most regret? What fears and doubts compel our choices?

Lent as Destabilization

Last year my pastor, Michael Rudzena, preached a sermon on Lent that has stayed with me since. He talked us through the story of the Transfiguration, in which Jesus takes James, Peter, and John with him to a “high mountain,” and reveals his glory in a dramatic and powerful way. My pastor explained this moment as an example of something Jesus does over and over: Destabilization.

The Gospels are full of stories of Jesus destabilizing the disciples’ worldview, in order to open them up to an experience of God they couldn’t have imagined before. He disrupts their experience of the world in order to reorient them to The Really Real. In this passage, they encounter the depth and power of who Jesus is, beyond his human shell. He is transfigured— elevated and shimmering with glory, locating himself between the great leaders of the Jewish people—Moses and Elijah.

Jesus only allows the powerful moment for a small amount of time before the sacred intensity is disrupted, the opposite of Peter’s request. In the midst of seeing Jesus as he really was, of being overwhelmed by glory, Peter wants that moment to be formalized, to make a holy structure so the power, the beauty, the meaning of the whole moment would never need to end.

I get that. My favorite moments of my life have been the hours after giving birth a new baby. The sweetness of holding them, of knowing I don’t have to be anywhere else in the world, do anything else. It’s sacred because it can’t last. And this is an ache every mother must live with for the rest of her child’s life. We can’t hold onto their babyhood. They grow and change and separate from us. And this is exactly what we want and not what we want at all, always at the same time. This is why new moms get told by grandmas in every Target in America to enjoy these days with her babies. All the grandmas have lost their babies to time. We can’t preserve the holiness of the most sacred moments of our lives. We can only move forward.

Peter couldn't preserve that moment either. The Holy Spirit moves over the mountain—a cloud passing through—leaving only Jesus. As my pastor Michael Rudzena put it, the cloud worked to distill the moment “into the one thing that matters.” What is the one thing that is left after the cloud? Jesus is the thing. And what does he say when that one thing is revealed? He says, Don’t Be Afraid.

This act of destabilization is a thing Jesus creates over and over for his followers. The disciples praised the architecture of the Temple and Jesus told them that pretty soon the stones of the Temple would be torn down. The disciples would often try to leverage something good for power, make something beautiful into something ultimate. Jesus shook that up every time. My pastor called it, “stripping away the nonessentials so that what is essential can emerge.”

This is what we’re asking the season of Lent to do—allowing the comforts and distractions of our lives to be decentered so that we give the Spirit free reign to recenter us. We are allowing the nonessentials to be stripped away. This is why Lent isn’t comfortable! When we are destabilized, our vulnerabilities are exposed. And exposing our vulnerabilities is actually the point of spiritual practices! We who follow Jesus are invited to see underneath the false allure of human achievement and power mongering embrace a different way of living in the world: The Kingdom of God, the Dream of God. The Really Real.

So in the Transfiguration, Jesus removes all the human pretense and allows Peter, James and John to see him as he truly is. He shows himself, and in doing so, reveals their vulnerability. That destabilization revealed not only who Jesus was but also who the disciples were. Why else would Jesus need to say: “Don’t be afraid”?

This is what happens when we view Lent as a source of spiritual pulse checking, a source of destabilization: First things get uncomfortable, then we get vulnerable. And we can’t continue as we did before. A choice is required.

Lent has zero extra powers. It is simply a season that has already been set aside for us to participate in that movement of destabilization and vulnerability. It’s simply a natural entry point into spiritual practice.

We have a few days before Ash Wednesday, friends. And this is our moment, not for self-improvement, but for destabilization that leads to connection. A moment to lift up our wrist and check our spiritual pulse: What does God have for us? What will we do with this opportunity?

A Slow Practice

Today’s practice is a chance to consider how to best embrace this season of Lent. Consider this your first step in checking your spiritual pulse. In the presence of God, consider these questions:

1. Is there any action, relationship, technology, or substance I use to distract myself from paying attention to my feelings, thoughts, or discomforts? If so, how do I use it to distract myself?

2. In an ideal world in which I am not bored, distracted, or too busy, how do I most easily connect with God?

3. Is there a practice that might make that ideal connection with God more possible? (For example, perhaps I feel most in touch with the Spirit when I’m in the natural world, when I’m serving others in a meaningful way, or when I’m reading.) Is there a way I can rearrange my time to make that particular action a weekly option?

4. Is there anything in my life I can subtract to help me pay attention to the work of God in my life? How might saying no to something seemingly good in my life for the next 40 days allow me more time for the connection with God that I crave?

After answering these questions, sit prayerfully with your answers, inviting God to bring some clarity to your mind and heart. What rises to the surface for you? Is there anything you want to add or subtract in your life over these next 40 days?

Make a commitment in prayer if you feel led to.

One more note: If your Lenten practice doesn't become clear, don’t worry. Just continue to look at these questions and your answers over the next few days, asking God to reveal what this Lenten season might hold for you. If you feel moved, sharing some of your answers with a friend, mentor, or spiritual director may help you discern your next right step.

A List of Things:

• So much of these ideas came from Michael Rudzena’s wonderful sermon during Lent last year. You can watch the entire thing on YouTube. Find it here.

• You can find the three gospel stories of the Transfiguration in Matthew 17, Mark 9, and Luke 9.

• I had a wonderful time speaking at St. Ann’s Church in Canyon, Texas last weekend. I’ll be a leading a retreat on the Beatitudes and spiritual practices in North Carolina here a few weeks. If your church or organization is looking for a teacher or retreat facilitator, I’m available to join you. I love sharing these ideas in person. Learn more here.

• Have you gotten a copy of Blessed Are The Rest of Us: How Limits and Longing Make Us Whole? You should get it here! Or find the audiobook version (I read it!) at Audible.