I don’t do New Year’s resolutions
That being said…
As January draws to an end in the next week and a half, and as Lent begins a couple weeks after that, I am once again looking at what I may be able to do (or not do) to reconnect spiritually with the discipline of the Lenten Season.
I first came back to church as an adult during Lent, in 1997, I think it was. So I was 27 years old, I was beginning to grow weary of living in Chicago (I would move back to central IL the following year), and something was missing in my life. Although I had grown up in church (the Lutheran Church — the ELCA, to be exact), I hadn’t been a churchgoer in years. It’s not like I had been living a life of debauchery in my 20s, though. I had lived with my girlfriend for a handful of years, and that relationship had fallen apart. I didn’t attend church, but I still believed in God in some way. I was lonely, and a bit depressed. And looking for something…
That’s when I wandered into a Catholic cathedral in downtown Chicago. I didn’t have any idea what people were doing, as far as genuflection, kneeling, the Sign of the Cross, etc. But I did feel that I was suddenly a part of something…a community. The following week, I tried out a Lenten service at an Episcopal Cathedral around the corner. And I shortly discovered The Book of Common Prayer (the 1979 Episcopal Church version).
Now I’m 54 years old, and I’ve worked for United Methodist churches for a good portion of my adult life. But, as a simple look through this blog (which I haven’t visited for almost two years) will show that I keep coming back to the BCP, in its various iterations. This time, it was because of a meeting I was in yesterday, where someone had mentioned liturgical tradition in the context of some Lenten services we are in the middle of planning at the United Methodist church I currently serve as Director of Music Ministries. So suddenly I realized it had been quite some time since I had picked up a BCP. And with Lent on the horizon, it seems like a good time to do something about that.
Here I am, sitting on my bed, with a handful of BCPs and Bibles scattered around me, thinking of how I may be able to reconnect with the BCP to bring some more meaning to the upcoming Lenten journey. I kind of interrupted my story above: when I first rediscovered my faith in the Episcopal Church in the 90s, I found tremendous meaning in the discipline of Lent, and I found the BCP to be a useful tool to help me navigate that new landscape. (Even though I grew up Lutheran, and we must have celebrated Lent in some way, to this day I can’t remember ever participating in it when I was young.)
As I’ve mentioned on this blog before, in the ups and downs of my faith journey as an adult (and there have been quite a few downs, spiritually speaking), I have always felt most connected to my faith when I’ve followed the Daily Office in the BCP (or should I say, a BCP). For me, there is something very important about connecting to the history of thousands and thousands of people who have come before me in the Christian faith, reciting the same words, and creating variations on those words over the decades and centuries.
So…I don’t know if I’ll “give up” anything for Lent. I don’t know if I’ll try to read the entire New Testament, or the entire Bible, as I have done during Lent in some years. I don’t even know if I’ll be all that faithful at doing the Daily Office every day during Lent. But I want to do something that involves reading those words, meditating on those Scriptures, and dipping my toe back into the waters of The Book of Common Prayer. I’ll be recording whatever thoughts come to me during that journey on this blog. If you happen to stumble upon it while you’re browsing through Medium, feel free to comment on what you read here. Maybe a few of us can enjoy the road ahead together.
