L.E.N.T.

I remember being in about 6th grade when a guest speaker at youth group told us to think of this handy acronym for the word "Lent": Let's Eliminate Negative Thinking. At the time, I thought that was a great idea. At the time, I was maybe 11 years old.

Maybe this guy was trying to encourage us to give up destructive mindsets and attitudes instead of just avoiding chocolate for 40 days. I somehow doubt that. The thing is, if Lent is a time of repentance (and by "if" I mean clearly it is), it makes no sense to eliminate negative thinking, because acknowledging sin tends to have some negative connotations for us, the sinners. Psalm 51, one of the great biblical pleas for forgiveness, is full of negative thinking. "For I know my transgressions, and my sin is ever before me" (v. 3). "Indeed, I was born guilty, a sinner when my mother conceived me" (v. 5). Lighten up, Dave!

I'll admit, I'm a bit of a weirdo when it comes to this sort of thing. I love Lent. Fat Tuesday's fun, but I can't wait for Ash Wednesday. My favorite holiday is Good Friday; the service where I feel most spiritually aware is the Tenebrae. I know this is not normal. Liturgically speaking, I love Christmas and Easter's even better, but the external trappings of those holidays (in-laws, last-minute shopping trips, lilies in the sanctuary that make me sneeze) often succeed in distracting me from the true celebration at hand. The literal stripping of the sanctuary on Maundy Thursday mirrors the way in which the days between the commemoration of the Last Supper and the festival of Christ's resurrection are figuratively stripped of decorative and secular white noise.

I haven't quite hammered out what my Lenten discipline will entail this year. I'll commit to attending morning prayer at the Divinity School 3 times a week (if not more) and I'd love to give up caffeine...but the point is, that goofy little acronym I've heard so many times completely misses the point of Lent. If we are seriously to confess and repent of our sins, that means we must acknowledge them. Confronting the sin in our lives is never a pleasant experience. It's not all gloom and doom, of course; we know that Easter's coming, that Jesus saved, saves and is saving us from the fear of sin and death. There is freedom in confession, joy in repentance. But we have to be willing to face the fact that we're a mess before we can ask Jesus to clean it up.