The Season of Lent is one of my favorite times of the year. To be sure, the Season of Lent is about sacrifice and repentance and the movement toward the death of Christ, so it may strike you as odd that this would be my favorite time of the year. The truth of the matter is that it has been during the Season of Lent that I have most consistently seen growth in my own spiritual life. This year was a little different.
On the night of Good Friday, during our Tenebrae service, I sat in our church, listening and watching the candles flicker and dance before I snuffed them out. I began to long for the service to be a great emotionally charged spiritual experience. The longer the service went on, as we journeyed through John’s account of Jesus’ betrayal, his trial, and execution, it became evident to me that I was not going to have the kind of experience for which I was hoping.
I have a love-hate relationship with emotionally charged spiritual experiences. For the most part, I usually poopoo these types of experiences because they can be too easily manufactured. I have sat through more services than I care to recount where a preacher, song evangelist, or worship leader has used music, or carefully placed words, stories, and phrases to manipulate his or her audience into making a commitment or to raising one’s hands or to donating money to the building fund.
But there’s something legitimate and right about wanting and longing for a spiritual experience that involves our emotions. Our emotions are a very real part of who we are, and it only makes sense that there should be some form of connectedness between our emotions and our spiritual growth and development. Obviously, some of us are more emotionally charged than others and probably more easily manipulated as well.
I’m one of those people who are not super emotional. Yet, on Good Friday I found myself longing for an emotionally significant spiritual experience. As I sat there and contemplated my lack of feeling (instead of concentrating on the words being spoken and sung), I began to realize why the service was not having any impact on me. It was because I had done very little of the hard work that is needed to make a night of contemplating the hopelessness and despair present in the death of Jesus something meaningful. By that, I mean I didn’t do well the things I usually do during Lent that really help me to grow. I didn’t pick a Lenten sacrifice that caused me any discomfort or created any time and space to contemplate my own sinfulness in the light of Christ’s Holiness. I didn’t read the Scriptures with any type of intentionality, and I didn’t pray with much sincerity. I just didn’t do the work.
Christian practices and Sacraments, in order for them to be personally meaningful and transformational, require that significant work is done before the fact. The problem is that we all too often don’t want to do the work before something as significant as Good Friday or even the Lord’s Super. Lent, or any other season of the church year, isn’t meaningful because we don’t work at it. We want only to show up and to get warm fuzzies.
The argument that I most hear against liturgy or spiritual practices like Lent is that they are stale, dry, and lifeless. I’m convinced it’s because we’ve gotten used to not doing the hard work to prepare ourselves for those moments. We want instant made, easily attained spiritual experiences. A really great worship band and a fantastic preacher who is able to tap our emotional wells is all we need to make us feel like we’ve communed with God.
I have nothing against great worship or the preacher who is able to move people with his or her words, but without us individually doing the work to prepare ourselves for those spiritual experiences, they become transitory lasting only a short time. Intense spiritual experiences without the preparatory hard work are like rice cakes - plenty of flavor with a satisfying crunch but with little or no nutritional value. A steady diet of rice cakes leaves us always hungry for more. In the same way that rice cakes lack the nutrients that our bodies need to carry us through the seriously strenuous times of our lives, so also do spiritual practices/worship experiences without us having done the hard work before hand.
Sooner or later, if we keep seeking those spiritual experiences without doing the hard work ourselves, even those will become stale, dry, and lifeless. Too many rice cakes will leave you jaded, looking for another snack with which to satisfy your cravings. And chances are, those snacks will have more flavor but even less nutritional value.
We must do the hard work, but we must do it together as the people of God – the church. Only then will we be able to experience rich spiritual experiences that have the ability to nourish through the hardest times of our lives. If we don’t, we’ll only end up getting fat and lazy, unable to do the work that God in Christ has called us to do.
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