dear hilary: lent and tenderness

Dear Hilary,It's Ash Wednesday today. I woke up feeling like it is any other day. I don't understand Lent. What's the point of giving things up? What does it accomplish in us? Isn't it just a lot of fuss about nothing? Did you give something up?Love,Un-LentenDear Not-Yet-Lenten,I used to say the same thing when I slumped in my pew in the dreary February days. I would say that it didn't matter, shouldn't matter, that I "gave something up." God and I were good. I talked to Him every now and then. I prayed, I went to church, and I could have a theological argument with the best of them. So what was the fuss about Lent? Why rend my heart (I didn't know what that meant...) and come back to the Lord? Had I really gone anywhere, anyway?And the answer that question was always, is always, yes. You see, I fling myself far away from the love of God. I hide in work and play, in comfortable living, in my sense of being so busy, so important, that I cannot possibly make time to be with Him. I hurt others with my words and actions, sling sarcasm and insult around as if it's cleverness.Sometimes, oh, sometimes, I preen like a bird proud of her bright feathers, trying to get your attention over here. I scoop up facebook shares and twitter mentions and try to breathe in from it a sense of making it or going somewhere or even, maybe this will really become something and make me a real writer... And I run away from God. I hide in my desire to be noticed and affirmed. I hide from Him in my plans and schemes, and I stop listening to His voice that says, "Enough, Hilary. It's enough that you write, just for you and me." Lent isn't just about "giving things up" because we are sinful or disobedient - it is a whole heart transformation. It is about giving up the things we hide behind. It is about revelation and light. God uses Lent to reveal us to ourselves; and only then can He be revealed in us.Lent is about the light of Christ: the light that reveals our dust selves, our sinful, ashamed selves, and the tenderness of that light. Because here is my favorite, surprising, radical thing about Lent: it is also about tenderness.It is about God holding us in the midst of our realizations and heart-rending, loving us as we give up before Him things we don't know how to live without, teaching us, and in that special way only He has, wrapping us up in His tenderness and grace.Lent is about this, love: tenderness and light.So I'm giving up Facebook and I'm giving up Twitter and blog promotion and writing my way in the silence of the blogosphere these 40 days. I'm giving that up so that, with bent knees and heart, I can lean into His tenderness.Love,hilary

to the girl in the pew ahead

Dear girl in the pew in front of me two Sundays ago,

I caught a glimpse of your face looking forlornly at that boy an aisle over. He's got a mop of brown hair that falls into his face when he bends over to pray, folding in at the waist, into prayer, into comfortable Anglican words. I looked over at him, eyes scrunched shut, the Prayers of the People echoing around the room, and then I looked back at you.

You wore that look of teenage tenderness, the special kind that exists just before the world overwhelms you, before you begin to feel the spider web of relationships as complicated, and people as these miraculous, difficult gifts. You wore that look at him during the prayers of the people.

I caught my breath. That tenderness? Don't lose it.

I don't know if he will ever look up at you. I don't know if he will sit next to you, sweaty-palmed and fidgeting, as you pray in the wide space of these familiar words. I don't know your story, your name, how you spend your Saturday mornings or your late Thursday nights.

But I caught that glimpse of you two Sundays ago, in that pew ahead of me, your shoulders leaning into the prayer, your face alive with that tenderness. And I saw in you something I want to ask you to protect and cherish in yourself. That tenderness is one of the first things I regretted about my heart when I sat in a pew years ago and looked forlornly at a boy across the aisle. That tenderness will haunt and follow you, a ghost you try to banish, a softness and sweetness that you wish desperately to avoid.

But please keep it. I'd offer you hours at a kitchen table journaling, runs for months in the woods wondering, the occasional shard of glass that hurts as you heal. I'd offer to walk through the story next to you, if you would promise not to condemn that look you give him when he isn't looking back at you.

I told myself this summer that tenderness was a problem. That caring, having a stake in it, wanting things to work out... that was weakness and worry and it was safer to be controlled, to be calm, to not let it touch me.

But then I saw you, and that tenderness, and how you weren't bent over in prayer but were looking at that mop of brown hair across the aisle, and I remembered that it isn't weakness. It's strength. Don't lose it in condemnation. Stories begin and end for a million reasons beyond our understanding. Maybe this one will end. Maybe it will begin again. Maybe it will be something in between. But the tenderness isn't the reason it ends, if it ends. Your care isn't the problem.

At the moment I saw you, we prayed, "Bless all whose lives are closely linked with ours, and grant that we may serve Christ in them, and love one another as he loves us."

And I wanted to lean in and whisper - this is the tenderhearted prayer. This is the prayer we pray after that forlorn, caring look.

Instead, I bent my head again to the back of the pew in front of me, felt the cool wood and my own heart beating. And I prayed.

Love,

hilary