In Lent, we join Jesus in the journey through the wilderness. We join him in self-deprivation where we can rediscover our truest need – our need for his constant abiding grace. Lent is not our journey alone
as individuals. Lent reminds us that our journey is collective. We as the church travel together. Through the journey we encourage each other, confess our sins to each other, pray for each other, and mourn with each other.
Lament is uncomfortable and unpredictable and, in some cases, constant. The longer we live the more likely we are to accumulate grief. Grief comes in various forms: tragedies, secret sins, bouts of depression, doubt, loneliness, broken relationships, hateful words, physical ailments, persecutions and injustices. Sometimes, God removes the reason for grief completely. For others, grief leaves scars and impressions that can’t quite be shaken. They may fade over time but don’t always leave us.
In the community of faith we celebrate our healing in Christ, but for those of us who suffer, our celebration is limited by grief. Our grief can make us feel less human. Rejection and bitterness distort us. Grief deforms us and shames us, so we hide it. In our Lenten journey with Christ and the church, we discover our griefs together. We have a need to be seen, and we are seen. Like Switchfoot’s ecclesiastical hymn The Blues, we say:
It’ll be a day like this one
When the sky falls down and the hungry and poor and deserted are found
Jesus is not unacquainted with sorrows. Jesus did not try to escape grief. He went through it, and he still bears those marks. He never refuses compassion to those who need it. Together in the wilderness, we embrace the discomfort of your griefs and weep. Joy will indeed come, but until it does we mourn with you and you mourn with us.
Our hope of course is that at the end of our wilderness journey, we finally find the kind of joy that erases the memory of our grief. Until then, what do we do? Why does God allow us to carry such deep wounds? One of my favorite reflections comes from Marilynne Robinson’s novel Lila. Lila is a forgotten woman. Treated so poorly through her hard life that she had no idea how to respond to the kindness she received from an old pastor who himself carried deep sorrow from a personal tragedy. The pastor’s compassion won out despite Lila’s best attempts to reject his acts of kindness. At the end of the novel, Lila reflects on the wounds that she carries in the view of invincible grace:
There was no way to abandon guilt, no decent way to disown it. All the tangles and knots of bitterness and desperation and fear had to be pitied. No, better, Grace has to fall over them.
We cannot bear our griefs on our own. We cannot self-heal. We know this. Jesus must heal us. Our griefs remind us to extend our open hands drawing sharp attention to our desperate need for grace. Jesus meets us here and fills our need abundantly.
Though we still lament loss, we are given grace to bear it. Not only to bear it, but to extend the same grace which has fallen on us to others. We share what we have received because in the wilderness of this world we all have the same need for the same grace. By partaking in the cycle of grace, the humanity we’ve lost through grief is restored.
nathanielcooley 
Leave a Reply