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Rediscovering Lent

I don’t believe I heard the word “Lent” until I was in college. Christmas I knew. Easter I knew, but not Lent.

I don’t remember seeing kids with ashes smeared on their foreheads in the late winter or spring even though there were plenty of Catholic kids and schools around my house. I went to a Christian Reformed day school where there was no Ash Wednesday special chapel or Lenten observation.

It was in Madison Square CRC when I was in college that I heard about Lent and first had ashes smeared on my head for “Ash Wednesday”. To me this was all cool, and new, and “spiritual” in a whole new way. My college church was apt for me in that way. In it I learned a lot about both liturgical Christians and charismatic Christians. A lot of other college students went to Madison Square for the inner city thing or the African American thing but I had gotten both of those in Paterson already. Advent, visits to a monastery, Christian meditation, Richard Foster, Thomas Merton and other stuff would follow in good time.

Fashionably Liturgical

Carl Trueman, professor at Westminster Seminary in Philadelphia wrote a piece this week entitled “Ash Wednesday, Picking and Choosing our Piety” which got quite a bit of attention. He noted this.

In light of this, I suspect that the reasons evangelicals are rediscovering Lent is as much to do with the poverty of their own liturgical tradition as anything. American evangelicals are past masters at appropriating anything that catches their fancy in church history and claiming it as their own, from the ancient Fathers as the first emergents to the Old School men of Old Princeton as the precursors of the Young, Restless, and Reformed to Dietrich Bonhoeffer as modern American Evangelical. Yet if your own tradition lacks the historical, liturgical and theological depth for which you are looking, it may be time to join a church which can provide the same.

I also fear that it speaks of a certain carnality: The desire to do something which simply looks cool and which has a certain ostentatious spirituality about it. As an act of piety, it costs nothing yet implies a deep seriousness. In fact, far from revealing deep seriousness, in an evangelical context it simply exposes the superficiality, eclectic consumerism and underlying identity confusion of the movement.

There’s been a fair amount of push-back on the piece.

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