Lent: A Slow Walk Through Winter

Ash Wednesday 2010

It has been an unseasonably mild winter here in the Pacific Northwest. While other parts of the country are getting slammed with snow and ice and flooding I am walking around my neighborhood looking at cherry blossoms emerging from trees that only a few weeks ago looked empty and barren. I started noticing a week or two ago the buds coming much earlier than normal. I’m not a winter kind of guy. So when I see new life emerging from what once looked lifeless something in me grabs on to that as a sign of hope that my own sense of barren emptiness may soon give way to the glorious gift of life and beauty.

I love spring. But the thing about spring that we often forget is that it has to follow winter. Spring is only spring because there has been a winter. During winter everything looks like it has died. The grass doesn’t grow; the trees have lost their leaves; it’s dark and grey more than it is light (remember I’m talking about the Pacific Northwest here). To the uninformed observer it might look as though it's the end of life. There was a spring, a summer, a fall and now everything has died and life is over. But to the person who has been through a few winters of their own they know that what looks like death is only the preamble to a glorious new beginning. But this new beginning must, let me state that a little more forcefully, ABSOLUTELY MUST!!!! be preceded by the death of winter.

Ash Wednesday is the day that we enter into a kind of spiritual winter called Lent. For the next 40 days leading up to Easter we remind ourselves that new life is always preceded by death. We learn anew the value of letting go, giving up the old in order to make room for the new that God will soon bring in us. Just as the trees must release their grip on each leaf and allow it to fall to the ground and die, so must we release our anxious clinging to those things that only hold us back from entering into the spring of our soul. In a sense we must surrender to the winter in order to more gloriously grasp the spring.

As I said, I’m not a winter kind of guy. In my mind winters are something to endure in order to get to the spring. If there were some other way to get there I would take it. I think that may be why so many people head south to Arizona during this time. It’s an avoidance technique used to deny the existence of winter and move right from fall to spring. But this doesn’t work when it comes to the spring time that God wants to bring to our soul. There is no avoiding winter in the spiritual world. People try, but it is simply impossible to arrive at new life without going through a kind of death and emptying of self. In fact new life is a far more powerful experience when we not only go through our own spiritual winter but actually embrace it. That’s right, this winter-hating, avoid-the-cold, detest-the-darkness kind of guy is saying that we must learn how to embrace the winter, not out of necessity, but out of love for God and the journey toward a deeper life in Him.

One of the most counter-intuitive aspects of the spiritual world is that life is only arrived at through death. Lent gives us an unhurried time to walk through the winter, observing what is dying (or needs to die) in us. It allows us time to listen to the darkness of the tomb that brought forth the light of new life. It tells us that when we feel the dark, bleak spiritual winter of our own soul that this is not an end but simply an overture to a new symphony of life that will soon be performed in us.

Lent is intended to be a slow walk. You are supposed to feel the cold, sense the darkness, enter into the emptiness. A slow walk through winter is the only way to fully emerge into the promise of springtime. So maybe the thing that you most need to give up for Lent this year, is hurry.

[I invite you to pray with me the lenten prayer by Henri Nouwen that I have included in the post below.]