“Give up for Lent what gets in the way of loving.”

          I don’t know that I’ve ever actually given up anything for Lent.  In my Protestant upbringing, it was a peculiarly penitential, Catholic thing to do, and we shunned things Catholic.  As I became an adult, it was a practice that never really appealed as a way to honor the 40 days leading up to Easter.  The idea of making yourself miserable by giving up something you loved seemed to give this season of self-examination and reflection the wrong slant.  Okay, the notion of sacrifice and self-denial has some hint of nobility, of a soul-strengthening worthiness we ought to aspire to.  But still it sang a sour note to my ear. 

           In his pre-service prayer and in his sermon on 17 Feb, Jim Weiss offered an idea that rang much truer:  “Give up for Lent what gets in the way of loving.”  What a long, rich list this brings to mind.  Resentments, jealousies, petty quarrels, grudges held long and firm, all sorts of smallnesses of mind and heart – these are among the things that get in our way of loving, that cloud our vision of the objects of our love, that blunt the edges of our passions and commitments.  Putting away these intangibles is much harder than locking away the candy and cookies – not least because defining them is more difficult.  But in the very contemplation of what they might be and how they get in the way, we are part way toward exorcising them, learning to live without them, maybe even for longer than the requisite 40 days.  We discover in the process that they have taken some of the sting out of sharp-edged love, lessened the risk of loving, saved us from the danger of making ourselves vulnerable to our own feelings, and thus protected us from being wholly human.  A scary prospect, but one worth exploring.