At the edge of Lent

A New Heart and a Right Spirit: Musings for Lent

Create in me a clean heart, O God,

and renew a right spirit within me (Psalm 51:10)

What has been is what will be,

And what has been done is what will be done;

There is nothing new under the sun (Ecclesiastes 1:9)

I contemplated giving up Facebook for Lent. A friend of mine once termed it “the eternal time-suck of death” and the name fits. Yet Facebook is also a source of connection to friends and family that I value. I decided instead to commit to a Facebook diet of sorts in lieu of complete abstinence. Those minutes I used to spend surfing I’ll spend writing. When I whine that I have no time to write, I am fooling myself. I have the time; I just choose to see what other people are doing, eating, saying and sharing instead.

This Lent I will hang in there with Facebook so I can link to regular blog posts (I use “regular” instead of daily to provide myself a loophole; Lent doesn’t require piling on burdens to prove one’s piety). The posts will respond to this paradox: How do I, how do we encounter newness in the everyday (other than going shopping)? What does newness sound like? Look like? Feel like? And what about those days when we feel like Qoheleth in Ecclesiastes: one damn day after another, all the same?

Of course, my take on newness won’t be yours. It will be newness as experienced by a mother of three kids living in central Pennsylvania during a cold winter that I trust will turn to spring. It will be informed by my passions for liturgy, music, ecology, healthy eating, music and anything else that creeps in.

I write these musings in the hope that something I discover, as mundane as it might be, will resonate with someone else looking for newness. Not the newness of a fad that fades in a breath, but newness deep within, the kind of clean heart that the psalmist describes.

Peace as we stand at the edge of Lent.