Teri Peterson has learned the hard way.
The first year she gave up coffee for Lent, she went straight from the sunrise Easter Sunday service to Starbucks.
The second year, she went to Starbucks before the sunrise service and brought the coffee with her to the worship service on the beach.
At the time, “I lived in downtown Chicago, so I walked past a Starbucks every 50 yards,” Peterson said. “I called it my personal wilderness — it was brutal.”
This year, Peterson — now an associate pastor at Ridgefield-Crystal Lake Church in Illinois, about 50 miles northwest of Chicago — is still figuring out how she observes Lent. She’s not likely to give something up — she figured out she spent more time those years thinking about coffee than about why she’d given up coffee.
“The ideal for Lent for me would be something that would allow me both to become closer to God and also to grow personally in a way that wasn’t related to my job,” Peterson said. “I have this opportunity to do something new and to create something as a habit.”
Increasingly, that’s how Presbyterians are thinking about Lent — as an opportunity to try a different approach. And they’re also showing creativity in what they do, with some making a commitment to an environmentally “green Lent,” for example, or to a new involvement in mission. Some blog for Lent; some give up blogging. Some turn to prayer or spiritual reading, either on their own or in community with others.
At Lewinsville Church in McLean, Virginia, for example, Ash Wednesday is marked as a fast day, with the fast broken in the evening with a simple supper of soup and bread, cooked by the youth. The money raised from that meal goes to support the mission trip the teenagers take in the summer.
There’s always at least one Taizé worship service during Lent.
And a biblical scholar — this year, Anthony Tambasco, a New Testament scholar from Georgetown University, is speaking for several nights.
In today’s culture, “these are not popular practices, to come to the church in the evening for Bible study or to fast or to share in a soup supper with our church family,” said Emily Berman D’Andrea, associate pastor at the Lewinsville church. “But we provide these opportunities side-by-side with what’s going on in the hurly-burly of Washington D.C.,” as an intentional alternative.
“Just as Advent is for Christmas, this is the time when we prepare for the season of abundance,” D’Andrea said. “We need to do some personal work through prayer and silence and Scripture study, to recognize the gift we’ve been given in our faith. The way we do that is in community. The joyful celebration will certainly come, but to truly revel in that we go through the dark shadows of Lent.”
The idea, in short, is not to do one particular thing, but to find a way to be intentional about one’s walk with God and the meaning of this liturgical season.
When the Web site, https://www.beliefnet.com/ asked people what they were giving up for Lent, people answered with everything from iPods (“so I can be free to hear from God”) to micro-brew beer to Little Debbie snack cakes. “I am hoping to give up a negative attitude I have toward a particular person,” one person wrote.
A woman wrote, “So many people have been extremely kind to us and haven’t really received a thank-you.” So she and her husband had made a list of those “who have impacted our lives in a Christ-like way. We are going to contact one person a day, either sending them a letter or a small gift, and tell them how much they have meant to us.”
Presbyterians for Restoring Creation has posted on its Web site the resource “40 Simple Ways to Fast and Feast for God’s Creation” — everything from line-drying clothes instead of using the dryer to fasting from consumer purchases.
“My sense is that people are eager to figure out how to do some of these things and are looking for people to tell them how to get started,” said Renee Rico, a minister and the organization’s coordinator. Two of the biggest areas of interest are energy consumption and the food that we eat, she said — along with “finding quiet and contemplation in nature.”
In a sermon several years ago, Rico gave the congregation a list of ideas and told them to pick something that had meaning for them — and not to get overwhelmed.
“I kind of discourage us using Lent as a sort of surrogate New Year’s resolution,” Rico said. “This isn’t a time necessary just to cleanse ourselves of bad habits. … The goal is to identify with Jesus Christ and to flow in his way of giving himself up for the sake of others.”
Some speak of Lenten practices as spiritual disciplines.
“I think it is important” to practice a spiritual discipline during Lent, said Sheldon Sorge, who has worked as a pastor and an associate in the Office of Theology and Worship at the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), and now is associate director of the Louisville Institute, a program funded by the Lilly Endowment at Louisville Presbyterian Theological Seminary.
By doing that, “the season becomes for us a time of refreshing our sense of what it means to be a disciple of Christ,” Sorge said. “It is a time to do as it were a checkup. How closely am I following the one whom I call Lord and master?”
Cynthia O’Brien, pastor of Smith Church, in the suburbs of Portland in Oregon, has compiled a list of ideas for people to consider at Lent — based on suggestions from her congregations over the years. “During Lent many Christians observe some sort of fasting or self-denial,” she wrote in the introduction to the list. “This not only a way to strengthen our will, but also helps us to simplify our lives. When we eat less, we realize that we normally consume more than we need for health and well-being. This may lead us to consider simplifying our lives in other ways.”
Among the suggestions:
- Spend time alone with someone who is feeling discouraged or rejected.
- List ten top priorities in your life. Determine the amount of time, energy, money used for each. Can and should there be a shift?
- Read the Bible daily, especially the Gospels.
- Draw a picture of your face and write all the things you do to ‘save face.’ Try a week or a day without any face-saving activities.
- Try to live more simply in all areas of your life: watch less TV, walk instead of driving, observe a quiet period each day.
- Go through your closets and give away clothes that are still in good condition, but that you could do without.
- Treat yourself to a meal of rice and tea once a week as a physical sign of concern with the real majority, the hungry world.
Part of the focus, for many at Lent, is on the idea of what one can do differently to draw closer to God.
Sorge, for example, has encouraged congregations he’s served to consider fasting during Lent, perhaps for one meal, perhaps for a day each week.
“Certainly the denial of food is something that catches me — I love my food,” he said. “It’s a way of focusing my attention whenever I do that on why it is I’m doing this, and being intentional about trying to pay more attention to my life as a disciple of Jesus Christ and to realize that my own indulgence of my appetites can be a distraction from that. There have been times when fasting has been very clarifying for me in terms of understanding God’s will and direction for me in a particular life circumstance. There’s no guarantee. It’s not automatic. But it has happened.”
Sorge also encouraged people to use the time they would otherwise have spent eating or preparing a meal for prayer or spiritual reading.
With that, “it becomes more than simply the absence of food, but something more positive,” he said.
Last year, Jonathan Watson, pastor of Cape Fear Church in Wilmington, N.C., offered a weekday Taizé service, featuring the flute music of two students from the church, the first time this small congregation, made up mostly of older people, had tried anything like that.
Lent, Watson said, is “an opportunity for us to unabashedly focus on the life of Jesus Christ” and he finds people willing to try new approaches in doing that.
Last year, he told his session, “I’m giving up carbonated soda for Lent — that’s my hang-up. But what it is for you is different.”
