At a recent meeting of the Campus Ministries Council of Eastern Mennonite University, we were asked to reflect on how we are being drawn to, or away from a practice of Lent. I remember feeling ambivalent every year about “giving up” something for Lent, and yet felt drawn to the seasonal ebbs and flows of the church calendar.
Growing up Mennonite, the only thing I knew about Lent was my Spanish teacher showing up with ashes smeared on his forehead at some mysterious time of the year. The Mennonite Church had inherited the iconoclastic fervor of the Reformation in Zurich, where mobs went through Catholic churches and pillaged any token of art or image that led to idolatry. Zwingli even banned music from his services because of its potential for idolatry. At least Anabaptist Mennonites didn’t go quite that far.
Nor did Mennonites celebrate Advent in my childhood experiences. We did celebrate Christmas with the obligatory pageant and gifts of hard candy and oranges. My daughter and her husband who are serving in Nicaragua report that the Evangelical Church there has banned any outright celebration even of Christmas because most of the celebrations have pagan roots. A strong case could be made for that.
The point of the Anabaptists, and probably of the Nicaraguan Christians, is that every day in the life of the Christian should be a day of “giving up something” for our faith. They had a word for it: “Gelassenheit.” Our spirituality was a “daily taking up of the cross” and following Jesus, not just something we did on special feast or fast days.
Over the years, Mennonites have drunk deeply at the wells of spirituality found in church tradition, especially of our Catholic brothers and sisters. Catholic writers of spirituality like Henri Nouwen, Ronald Rolheiser, and Richard Rohr, among others, have influenced greatly our thinking about ritual. Because of this influence Mennonites have begun following the church calendar and the lectionary, with special Lenten and Advent emphases in our Sunday morning gatherings. I think this has had mostly a positive effect on the life of the church. But have we gone too far?
John Philip Newell, who writes extensively on Celtic spirituality, writes about a Celtic sensibility toward ritual which I think comes close to what Anabaptists must have been thinking. In his book Searching for the Heartbeat of God, Newell writes, “God is at the heart of all life, in both the visible and invisible. We don’t have to try to reach God through acts of devotion, for God is closer to us than our very breath.” (Newell, 1997)
Perhaps we need rituals to remind us of how close God is to us because our distracted, materialistic culture has removed us so far from his presence. Perhaps we need seasons of the year to emphasize different aspects of God’s acts on our behalf. Yet I remain ambivalent about giving up something for Lent. I am not ambivalent, however, about wanting to be so aware of God in every moment of every day, that I can sense him in my breath.
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