Friday, February 26, 2021
Friday in the First Week of Lent
Bob Mennel
The Collect of the Day
Lord Christ, our eternal Redeemer, grant us such fellowship in your sufferings, that, filled with your Holy Spirit, we may subdue the flesh to the spirit, and the spirit to you, and at the last attain to the glory of your resurrection; who lives and reigns with the Father and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.
Readings: Ezekiel 18:21–28, Matthew 5:20–26 & Psalm 130
The Season of Lent is by definition a hard time. In the aftermath of the Council of Nicea in 325 A.D., the Church codified Lent and integrated it into the liturgical year. It became a time to draw close to God in deepened awareness of His Sacrifice in sending the Lord Jesus Christ to redeem humankind.
Forty days of prayer and self-examination were set aside for Lent, harkening back to Christ’s 40 days of fasting in the desert in preparation for His ministry. Hungry though He was, He resisted all temptations to eat or otherwise use His power. Accordingly, Lent encouraged the faithful to refrain from self-indulgence for 40 days as an enduring reminder of Christ’s sacrifice. Lenten preparation thus magnified the joy of Easter—the promise of life eternal in Christ’s Resurrection.
My own Lenten journey was for many years a sad thing. Sparsely-filled mite boxes from Winnetka’s Christ Church in the 1950s reproach me to this day. Even worse, for 25 years I was a card-carrying secular humanist, ignoring Lent altogether. In the 1980s, when Susan and I met, she was asked by our St. John’s friend, Father Warren Deane, how it was working out. She replied positively, with the caveat that I was still something of a “secular humanist.” “Give him a chance,” Warren suggested, “Some of my best friends are secular humanists!”
I began to confront that label itself in my work as a history teacher and in my life outside the classroom. In the twentieth-century, secularism shaped narratives of progress and scientific achievement. In that view, religion was criticized for opposing science, and underwriting conformity. And yet, major events—the World Wars and the Holocaust—raised troubling questions about such positive histories, a foremost one being: Had not invention actually made the modern age more, not less destructive?
In contrast, humanism, the other word in the phrase, valued traditions of resistance to evil through biblical texts, art, literature and religious writing. In the shorthand of the classroom, it was time to give John Dewey a rest and to assign Reinhold Niebuhr. Original Sin, that skunk at the garden party of modernism, demanded attention from teacher and student alike.
What then about the “life outside”? Well, Susan gave me a break for which I have been thankful every day since. And, it has come full circle in our work—Susan’s use of St. Augustine’s Confessions to anticipate elements of post-modernism converged with my study of a Nova Scotia family within whose world the Confessions still resonated. And finally, my faith has been nurtured by the community of St. John’s Church, quelling doubt and lifting the spirit in Lent and all seasons.