Lent has been my favorite season since I started observing it, possibly because all Lents lead back to my first Ash Wednesday service I attended. Toward the end of my senior year of undergrad, I was invited to an Anglican church. I attended for the first time only two Sundays before Ash Wednesday, was there through Easter, and graduated soon after. My church growing up didn’t practice Lent, didn’t even have an altar. The altar in the Anglican church stood under a large crown of thorns hanging from the ceiling, penned in by a square rail. People knelt on all sides. At my parents’ church, we passed the bread and grape juice and served ourselves; I had only seen people kneel and receive communion at the Catholic funerals of my Catholic relatives. I didn’t partake, not at my first service.
On Ash Wednesday, I wore a red scarf, conscious of symbolism. By the time I walked out of the service with my friends, it was snowing in the dark parking lot—as if also conscious of symbolism, which, yes, I wrote into a poem later that night; that’s how heavy-handed the thing was. All I can say is that it struck me, somehow. Between entering in and leaving, I had experienced something new. Kneeling between the pews for the Lord have mercys. The taste of the communion wine (bad, but all communion wine is bad). Asking my friends how long I should wear the cross. Wearing it my whole six-to-midnight shift at the college library. I remember all this distinctly. That person was me, but she and I are not the same.
Two weeks into this year’s Lent, my father asked me if I was reading anything. I said, “Oh! I’m doing my Lent study. I gave up fiction again this year.” I handed him Forgiveness: An Alternative Account, of which I had read only the introduction. My father glanced at it—the cross on the cover made of a nail and an olive branch—and then asked me what was the purpose of reading it, and do I still look to the Bible as the ultimate source of truth? In other words, Why are you doing this?
So. It did not immediately occur to me to wonder whether he was asking a worthwhile question. First I was busy being bemused (“Are you asking me if I believe in the Bible because I’m reading another book?”) and then remembered that my Christianity is suspect to him (“Because you go to a liberal church, and your bishop is a woman, which isn’t biblical”). (“She’s also a married lesbian,” I wanted to say, “and she’ll be receiving me into the Episcopal church this weekend!” But I didn’t say it.)
I often end up explaining my Lent study, especially to my coworkers, who (being librarians and library staff) are often on the hunt for a good book, who want to know what you’re reading and why. I feel a little pretentious talking about it, though also pleased to be asked, and then more embarrassed for being pleased. Well, my Catholic coworkers don’t understand giving up fiction for Lent, and my other coworkers don’t understand that I’m not Catholic. “No one told me to give something up,” I find myself saying. “I wanted to. Also I’m Episcopalian.” No one knows what that means. No one knows what being received is, either. And I can say that I wanted to make a commitment to the church, to my specific church, but it ends up at that question again.
The same question when I see my parents celebrate the romantic lives of my siblings and know they won’t celebrate mine. When Christians ban books in libraries and call my existence obscene. When I pray and hear nothing. Before I decide to be publicly received into the church where I’ve been welcomed. In longing, in disgust, in earnest seeking. Why am I doing this?
The traditional purpose of Christian fasting isn’t to give something up for its own sake, but to give up something that reminds us of our relationship with God. When we go without meat, we remember that we depend on God for true sustenance. For forty days, I go into a wilderness of less distraction, and I go to find God.
I subsist on ideas. The kind of nourishment I get from art (that is, fiction, which I can read so much of, so fast, any other time of year) is not the same as what I get from deliberate study. I study because I don’t want to be afraid of new ideas. I want new ways of seeing, or as St. Paul puts it, to “be transformed by the renewing of your mind” (Romans 12:2, in the NIV translation imprinted on my memory). I study to find out what I believe and don’t believe and why. I study to understand how to live my life lovingly. I study for the same reasons I practice this faith at all. Because I learn.
Lent 2024 reading log
I haven’t decided how to format my reading logs here, but I don’t think this will be typical. I beg your patience. Most notable (in terms of my reflection) are bolded, but if you’re curious about any I don’t address, please ask.
Read for study:
Ladder to the Light: An Indigenous Elder’s Meditations on Hope and Courage by Steven Charleston (2021)
Forgiveness: An Alternative Account by Matthew Ichihashi Potts (2022)
The Sacred Life of Bread: Uncovering the Mystery of an Ordinary Loaf by Meghan Murphy-Gill (2023)
The Cloister Walk by Kathleen Norris (1996)*
The Four Vision Quests of Jesus by Steven Charleston (2015)
Other non-fiction:
What My Bones Know: A Memoir of Healing from Complex Trauma by Stephanie Foo (2022) [audio book]
My Pancreas Broke, But My Life Got Better by Kabi Nagata (2023)
We Could Have Been Friends, My Father and I: A Palestinian Memoir by Raja Shehadeh (2023)
Hijab Butch Blues by Lamya H (2023) [audio book]
The Fire Next Time by James Baldwin (1963) [audio book]
Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates (2015) [audio book]
Palestinian Walks: Forays into a Vanishing Landscape by Raja Shehadeh (2008) [audio book]
Fierce Femmes and Notorious Liars by Kai Cheng Thom (2016) [audio book]
All Boys Aren’t Blue by George M. Johnson (2020) [audio book]
Watched:
I Am Not Your Negro (2016)
*=still reading
Last year I read 7 books for my study, 5 of which were audio books, and 6 recreationally, in print. This year, I couldn’t find any of my potential study books on audio, but 7 of the 9 recreational titles were books (mostly short memoirs) I listened to on my commute. Though this isn’t dramatically true by the numbers, I felt as if I read much less this year. I chose books that required slower reading than I had anticipated from the size of them. This was probably good for me.
The Cloister Walk, which is composed of short entries dated across the church year by a poet about her experiences at and around a Benedictine monastery, reminded me of the concept of lectio divina, holy reading — the practice of slow reading (primarily the Bible), meditating on whatever jumps out, especially as to words. I was first introduced to the concept in a poetry class, in fact, when my professor chose a Psalm and read it through twice, with a pause between, before opening every discussion. (If you don’t know what college I attended, please don’t guess.) The second reading was always the one that struck me. Norris brings up lectio divina first in her preface, to prepare the reader for what they are getting into, then again in later chapters:
[T]he practice of lectio does strike me as similar to the practice of writing poetry, in that it is not an intellectual procedure so much as an existential one. Grounded in a meditative reading of scriptures, it soon becomes much more; a way of reading that world and one’s place in it. To quote a fourth-century monk, it is a way of reading that “works the earth of the heart.”
I should try telling my friends who have a hard time comprehending why I like to spend so much time going to church with the Benedictines that I do so for the same reasons I write: to let words work the earth of my heart. To sing, to read poetry aloud, and to have the poetry and wild stories of scripture read to me. To respond with others, in blessed silence.
Norris writes about daily life in the monastery, about ritual, about her friendships with monks and nuns and how they surprise her, about her marriage, about poetry, and about feminism (in a very 90s way; her chapter meditating on virgin martyrs quotes Andrea Dworkin a lot which I can’t say I loved). Despite its datedness, I’m finding much of it beautiful and insightful to me as an artist as well as a Christian. I can’t bring myself to read it any faster—I feel like I’m missing gems if I do.
But Forgiveness slowed me down the most. It’s been a long time since I read such an academic theological text. Potts takes an interesting approach, though, examining theology in part through literary analysis—two of the books he uses, Gilead by Marilynne Robinson and Beloved by Toni Morrison, I also read and loved in college. This gave me a door into his arguments that I might otherwise have found even thornier, but the book is more than a literary treatment of forgiveness. He looks at stories about people who don’t want to forget, who don’t reconcile, who are still angry with each other, who cannot heal, and asks (in the words of his own preface): what if forgiveness looks like that? He argues that forgiveness is not an affective emotional transformation and not aimed toward overcoming anger, reconciliation, or any “peace” that comes from forgetting the past, because the past can’t be undone, and therefore can’t be made right. Instead, forgiveness brings wrongs that can never be righted back into memory and refuses to deny them. Potts likens it to grieving, saying that forgiveness can only happen in the full knowledge that revenge, retribution, or reconciliation will not and cannot take the source of grief away. To summarize in a way that doesn’t do justice to the book: Forgiveness accepts its own impossibility and loves the enemy anyway.
When I feel that someone else is reading the Bible against the text, part me folds its arms and refuses to budge. Even if what I think about the text is something I’ve believed since I was a child and never reexamined. This feeling surfaced a lot while reading Forgiveness, but as I’ve thought about it more (and I have kept thinking about it), I’ve loosened my hold on my stubborness. For that reason, I’m glad that my library hold on The Four Vision Quests of Jesus came after I was done with Potts. I had wanted to read something by Steven Charleston, who is an indigenous (Choctaw) elder and Episcopal priest, but Ladder to the Light was the easiest to get, so I started there. It was not what I was looking for at all. Ladder is written to people of any faith, or no faith; I understand the value of that, but what I wanted was Charleston’s perspective on and of Christianity, specifically. Four Visions is as much about his personal journey of reconciling two halves of his being (as he describes it) as it is about Native theology. And it is about both. After discussing his own spiritual and cultural history, Charleston explores the life of Jesus (via the Gospel of Matthew) in the context of vision quests and other Native traditions. I think I was better prepared to receive it, after wrestling with Potts for awhile reminded me of how much freedom we have in how we read.
Finally, Hijab Butch Blues I read with no particular spiritual intentions, but it was my favorite thing I read during Lent. It also hit me hardest about faith. It is the memoir of an anonymous Muslim lesbian, Lamya H, who was born in an unnamed Southeast Asian country, then moved to an Arab country, and eventually settled in the United States. Each chapter takes a different figure in Islam as a lens focused on her life. Many were familiar to me by name, but their stories in the Quran were just different enough to catch me off-guard. She imagines them, she inhabits them, she feels deeply for and about them. Her writing is beautiful, but even more I was drawn to how fully she owns her feelings and imagination as she examines the stories of her faith. She made me want to go and do likewise.
It feels silly to say I saw myself in Lamya, as if personal identification is what one should look for when reading memoir, as if how relatable a story is matters at all. And yet Hijab Butch Blues felt closer to my heart than The Sacred Life of Bread, written by another priest of my denomination. Even from my “recreational” reading, I saw a broad range of perspective on religion emerge. There are Christians here who don’t seem too sure about the resurrection, and atheists who believe most strongly in the power and necessity of love. All of them became part of my Lent practice this year, and I bless them for it—and you, for reading this entry, whatever you believe or don’t.
I often feel strange in my faith. Too liberal for my evangelical family, who think my views on gender and sexuality mean that I don’t value Scripture, and yet I can’t get enough of it, the words of the Bible, translated, received, interpreted and reinterpreted. My respect for other people and for the body of work produced by scribes and messengers of God stem from, I think, the same place in me. I hope it’s love, but I keep trying to learn.
Right now, I still feel like I’m in the wilderness. On Easter morning, I did not wake up refreshed, but with a sense of dread and malaise that only deepened (and indeed, I typed much of this while physically ill). I’m discouraged and disappointed. Like Matthew Ichihashi Potts, I have been thinking about the disciples after the resurrection, left with the terror and grief of a persistently empty tomb (Mark 16:1-8, the original ending of that Gospel). I have been dwelling on Mary Magdalene weeping in the garden. This is not, of course, what I hoped to be feeling, but it doesn’t mean that my fast failed. The purpose of Lent is not that it promises reward or reprieve. It only offers hope—that each day, I will meet with God.
i feel refreshed after reading this. thank you for sharing <33