**Title plays on the wedding blog craze today, wherein handmade weddings with rustic chic/vintage themes topple over one another in a Babel-like tower of human creativity. Mason jars are, to put it mildly, often used in decor. I’m sorry if this title makes no sense to you, but I am steeped in this nutso world right now…and yes, there will be mason jars at our wedding.

I’ve been fascinated by sacraments and sacramental theology since my trip to Orvieto, Italy, last summer. Born and raised Pentecostal, I don’t think I’d even heard the word “sacrament” until my twenties, and even then, it had disturbingly Catholic connotations. But since I’ve come to Fuller, the idea of sacraments has become utterly captivating. St. Augustine said that sacraments are visible signs of invisible grace, and I dig that. I love the idea of the world being charged with God’s presence, of his Spirit shading us from the boughs of a magnolia tree or reminding us of our smallness by a sunset’s consuming fire.

There are seven recognized sacraments in the Catholic tradition, and though I can’t rattle them off by heart, I do know a few: the Lord’s Supper, baptism, marriage. I get communion as a sacrament; God using the most basic of our needs—hunger and thirst—to remind us of the risk he took for us, and to provide a doorway into a mysterious union with this very Son of God.

And baptism—I remember the day I was baptized at 17 years old in a church member’s hot tub, the strong hands of my pastor lifting me out of the water, dead for a moment and into the February sunshine and new life. Water is almost sacramental by nature, as are the other elements: earth, wind, fire. Recently on a day trip to the mountains my fiancé and I paddled a canoe around the lake, then dragged it on shore so we could take a dip in the cold clear green water. I can’t explain what happened, but something wound tight and anxious in my heart was wiggled loose by that mountain water. I came out new.

But the sacrament of marriage—this has always mystified me. How is it lumped in with baptism and the bread and wine of the Lord’s Supper? Does something mysterious, even mystical, happen when a person makes vows to another, to have and to hold and to cherish?

I’m getting married in a matter of weeks, so these things have been on my mind. I’ve been pondering the seriousness of what I’m doing, but the frantic nature of wedding planning blurs and muffles my thoughts like snow flurries. In the midst of finding a venue, selecting a caterer, and shopping for a dress, I think about the fact that I am preparing for a ceremony, a rite of passage, a ritual, even. That alone makes it feel like a serious event. But then, when I think about what the ceremony is marking—the commitment to share everything I have, everything I am with another broken but beautiful human being, for life—I am utterly sobered. “People do this every single day!” I cried recently to my friend Megan. “Do they know how big a deal it is?” As the years go by, people are seeing the institute of marriage as less permanent, more fluid. Last winter I read somewhere that for my generation, the only decision seen as irreversible is having children.

But for me, marriage is a commitment for life, and I have not found myself as giddy with joy over the wedding as the button-nosed pixies seem to be in romantic comedies. I even wonder about my emotional state at the ceremony itself. I take my vows in life incredibly seriously, and this is one of the most significant vows I will ever make.

Will our guests worry if I look too serious?

Many Christians say, “Choosing your spouse is the most important, life-altering decision you will ever make—next to choosing to follow Christ.” I disagree. When I chose to follow Christ, I could reverse my decision any time I wanted to. I still can. I can walk away from this life and commitment right now, and although I will suffer consequences, they are not as tangible as those of a divorce. However, I do see that my relationship with Christ has been an endless string of little yes-es, of choosing again and again to listen, obey, do the hard thing, open my heart, forgive, let go, love when it hurts. I’m guessing marriage will be like that, too.

There are plenty of chances for those choices now, as well, in the ups and downs of engagement. It’s a crazy season when a ring on your finger suddenly raises the stakes—oh, this is for life—and you’re making endless decisions every day, dealing with the pressure of well-meaning friends, relatives, and wedding blogs.  The increasing intimacy of beginning to merge your life with another is scary, indeed, and can feel very much like a sanctifying, consuming fire. It can also feel like an emotional roller coaster, as you are faced again and again with the other’s brokenness—but so much worse, your own brokenness, in a way you’ve never had to face it before. And yet as you slog on, you find yourself wading deeper into this desperate love sickness you didn’t even know was possible in real life. The Sufi mystic Rumi puts it so well in one of his love poems:

We are the mirror as well as the face in it.


We are tasting the taste this minute


of eternity. We are pain


and what cures pain, both. We are


the sweet cold water and the jar that pours.

I want to hold you close like a lute, so we can cry out with loving.

You would rather throw stones at a mirror?


I am your mirror, and here are the stones.

It’s hard to know sometimes if I’m throwing stones at Robert, or at myself. The one thing I can know is that by seeing myself reflected so clearly in the mirror of my beloved—in the way my words and my deeds heal him or hurt him—my precious illusion of myself has been shattered.

What is this but sacrament?

How can I not be sober about the ceremony for which I am preparing, when I will stand before my community and commit to this thrilling and excruciating process, this life of endless little choices for love, for another rather than myself?

And when I think back to my baptism, that other sacramental milestone, I approached it with the utmost seriousness as well. I remember sitting in a room with the others getting baptized, listening to our pastor talk about what it means, the public commitment we were making. A few moments later, with grave purpose I took three steps down into the warm water and crossed my arms over my chest. “I baptize you, Joy, in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit,” and I was submerged in silence and darkness. Then it was like I was being suctioned out of the water, which rushed off of me in drops and sheets, and I was laughing—crying and laughing—I was dunked in grace made visible and knew that everything had changed.

I wrote this nearing the end of a summer-long Bible study where about ten of us artistic-types (musicians, writers, photographers, painters, etc) gathered to read and discuss and create our way through Ecclesiastes, with the hope of sharing our work at an art show near summer’s end. We did that, in an art show/house party in group member Helen’s backyard in Silver Lake. It was a fantastic night, and I had the opportunity to read this piece to the small crowd who had assembled to drink sangria and discuss the wisdom of the Teacher. When I shared the preliminary piece with just the group a couple weeks earlier, one said it reminded them of the letter read at the end of The Breakfast Club. I took that as a compliment.

In my Ecclesiastes Bible study group this summer, most of us are seminarians or recent seminary grads—a little disillusioned, definitely deconstructed, picking up pieces where we can and often trying not to fall into the abyss of doubt, cynicism, or whatever brand of philosophy that tells us we’re fools for believing the way we do.

Ecclesiastes is a heavy book—don’t read it if you’re in a funk, or you’ll never get out. Unfortunately, that’s where I’ve been most of the summer: in a funk. I keep stepping into little dark puddles of despair or low self-esteem or ultrasensitivity so that the pain of the world becomes too crushing for my small soul to bear. Others in our group are jobless, or wrestling with bosses, or questioning their calling and place in this world, or helping parents deal with illness, or grieving the loss of parents. Ecclesiastes is not a cure for our ailments, nor does it give us the answers we are searching for.

It is tempting to read the Teacher’s matter of fact sayings as authoritative declarations of Truth—“All things are wearisome…there is nothing new under the sun” or “Better off than both the dead and the living is the one who has never existed…” But really, all the Teacher does is give you words and sayings that yank back the curtain in your soul, exposing where you’ve been cowering in fear and confusion. You are forced to lay each of your squirmy, shadowy questions on the table.

“Vanity of vanities! All is vanity.” The opening lines of Ecclesiastes wrench the first wriggling question from the shadows: Is it all vanity? In our summer group, we wondered about this together and apart. Many translations use the word “meaningless” instead. Is it all meaningless? Our studies, our preparing of meals, our washing of clothes, our meeting friends for drinks, our words on pages, our paint on canvasses, our music in ears. We ventured further: Are we merely attempting to create meaning? Religion is a meaning-making machine, so many are quick to point out. Ecclesiastes rips the rug out from under our meaning so that the world loses its vibrancy and everything is dull and muted, with muffled edges—each day and thought shrouded in a dreary fog.

But wait! One of us rouses from the sleepy disenchantment of vaporous existence and asks, “What about God? What about the Holy Spirit?” Yes! I remember the times that the Spirit moved through my life and breathed into the mundane: a simple meal became a feast where a mysterious unity sprouted and blossomed in the hearts of people who could not be more different. The Spirit took tears of grief and let them water another’s plot of ground for healing. What is this but the Holy Spirit? What is this but sacrament—visible signs of invisible grace, as Augustine defines it?

Just the other day I read some words of Jesus that helped me put the wisdom of Ecclesiastes and my melancholy musings in perspective. In the Gospel of Luke, he tells the crowds that one day the “Queen of the South will rise up with the people of this generation at the judgment and condemn them, because she came from the ends of the earth to hear the wisdom of Solomon and behold, something greater than Solomon is here.”

Traditionally, scholars attribute Ecclesiastes to Solomon, known through the ages for his superhuman wisdom. I think that’s why we take the book so seriously, beseeching the Teacher to dispense instruction for human existence. But Jesus said, Look. I am Wisdom. What I say supersedes the teachings even of Solomon. I say that nothing is impossible with God; I say that joy in abundance can be yours; I say that God is actually a Father who wants you to be right with him. The world isn’t two-dimensional and only black, white, and grey. I’ve let my Spirit loose in the world and now the universe is springing up in color everywhere—real, solid, three-dimensional and in your face.

But Jesus wasn’t really doing anything new, I think. It seems to me that it’s always been like that, for those who have eyes to see it. The apostle Paul said that that the people of Israel, wandering through the desert, partook of sacrament every single day: “all ate the same spiritual food; and all drank the same spiritual drink, for they were drinking from a spiritual rock which followed them; and the rock was Christ” (10:3-4). I don’t think it gets much more sacramental and mysterious than that. The food that we eat, the water we drink, the sheltering boughs of a tree—these all have potential to be channels to the divine. “Earth is crammed with heaven,” Elizabeth Barrett Browning said, but we must choose whether we’ll see God in the burning bush or just pick blackberries from it instead. I don’t mean that food or water or blackberry bushes are god or gods, but they do whisper to us: “It’s not meaningless.” They tell us about a good Father who made us all—Sister Moon, Brother Sun, and me—as they give us small sips and spoonfuls of his truth.

The Return of the Prodigal Son, Rembrandt

I think if you asked me, at any point in my life as a Christian, whether I thought there were limits to God’s love I would say no. Even tonight at church, we sang, “How wide, how long, how high, how deep, how endless is your love for me,” in a song of gratitude for God’s love of “dirty sinners like you and me.”

But last spring, in a collection of essays for Lent, I read a piece by Madeleine L’Engle, in which she included this story:

…There is an old legend that after his death Judas found himself at the bottom of a deep and slimy pit. For thousands of years he wept his repentance, and when the tears were finally spent he looked up and saw, way, way up, a tiny glimmer of light. After he had contemplated it for another thousand years or so, he began to try to climb up towards it. The walls of the pit were dank and slimy, and he kept slipping back down. Finally, after great effort, he neared the top, and then he slipped and fell all the way back down. It took him many years to recover, all the time weeping bitter tears of grief and repentance, and then he started to climb up again. After many more falls and efforts and failures he reached the top and dragged himself into an upper room with twelve people seated around a table. “We’ve been waiting for you, Judas,” Jesus said. “We couldn’t begin till you came.”

That floored me. I was deeply moved, and deeply confused. Judas, even Judas, might be forgiven and welcomed back to the table? Jesus said that heaven throws a party every time one sinner repents, but does that include when the ultimate traitor weeps repentant tears in the prison of his own darkness? When L’Engle heard the story about Judas at a clergy conference, many of the other priests and ministers were utterly offended by the idea of Judas being welcomed back into Jesus’s inner circle. But she says, “I was horrified at their offense. Would they find me, too, unforgivable?” I see her point. How many times have I betrayed Jesus and turned my back on him? All of his disciples ran away, and yet he came to them with great joy in his resurrected flesh, and breathed peace into their lungs before they had a chance to beg his forgiveness.

That essay stretched my imagination and my understanding of God’s mercy, but then today I read something by L’Engle that even blew that up. In a chapter on the Trinity, she points out that “we mortals want limits, limits to what is demanded of us, limits to God’s love, limits to those God is willing to redeem, limits to those who are going to be saved.” But, as I once heard a worship leader say, God’s love has no walls or ceiling or floors, and L’Engle feels this limitless quality applies to God’s redemption, as well. It is not only for human beings but also for all of creation and in that, she includes angels and archangels, stars, galaxies, atoms. She speaks of understanding the Trinity as inseparable from “the terrible and total reconciliation” that will one day come, and uses this poem by James Stephens as illustration:

On a rusty iron throne
In the farthest bounds of space,
I saw Satan sit alone.
Old and haggard was his face,
For his work was done and he
Rested in eternity

Down to him from out the sun
Came his brother and his friend
Saying, “Now the work is done,
Enmity is at an end.”
And he guided Satan to
Paradise that he knew.

Uriel, without a frown,
Michael, without a spear,
Gabriel came winging down,
Welcoming their ancient peer,
And they seated him beside
One who had been crucified.

Seriously? Even Satan, the Enemy of all that is good and holy and pure and light and music and laughter? Will he be welcomed to the table, if only he lays down his defenses and asks to come back in? Is he not part of God’s good creation? There is part of me that recoils at such an idea—how could we live, knowing that he is not eternally punished for the evil we all suffered at his hand during our short and fretful lives on earth? For the bondage he kept us in, for the way he distorted love and sex, for the way he turned us against each other so that we would turn away from the Holy One? I remember Dante’s depiction of Satan in the Inferno, in the very pit of hell, which is not fiery and sulfuric but a freezing and eerily quiet place. Satan stands frozen up to his waist, crying bitter tears and flapping his six wings in torment, endlessly gnawing on the world’s most notorious traitors: Judas, Brutus, and Cassius. It feels good to think of the Emperor of the Universe of Pain, as Dante calls him, suffering in his own eternal agony.

But what if, a million years after the world ends—when we are still feasting with the Lamb and singing songs and dancing jigs and playing games and watching beauty spring out of beauty—what if Satan decides he’s sorry? What if he decides he wants to be back in the family, and crawls the trillion miles toward heaven on his knees, weeping bitter tears of remorse with an aching heart? Will we stop our revelry and turn toward the doors of heaven with held breath, waiting for his knock? Perhaps the Father will exchange glances with the Son, and the Spirit will give a knowing nod, and the three will say in strong voices of joy, “Come in! We’ve been waiting for you.” And all heaven will begin the party anew.

Thoughts?

I’ve joined an artists’ summer small group, where we study and discuss the book of Ecclesiastes, and hopefully let our reflection spring into creative expression. Last week was our first time meeting, and we discussed the first chapter. Below is my response to Ecclesiastes 1:7, entitled “But the Sea is Not Full.”

Lately I’ve been wanting to weep. I’m not sure why, but at a couple of points each day—usually in the evening, or just before bed—there’s a tight swelling in my chest. All the emotions I’d stuffed there for 12 hours decide to show up en masse at the door of my heart, demanding to be let in. I can’t look at them, this rag tag bunch of feelings: self-pity with her one droopy eye, anger’s furrowed brow and clenched fist, confusion looking dopey and befuddled, anxiety wringing her hands and pacing. There’s also wonder and compassion, willowy twins toward the back of the crowd, patient and silent but pleading with big wet eyes to be admitted.

I might open the door a crack, sneer at the crowd with contempt, and slam it again in their faces. I eat some cereal out of the box, by the fistful , or I scroll through the news feed on Facebook for an hour. They go away, eventually, and I breathe a sigh of relief. I just don’t have room for them all—not to mention the fact that wonder always leaves me aching for more, and compassion always demands more of me. It’s more than I can take.

“All the rivers flow into the sea, but the sea is not full. To the place where the rivers flow, there they flow again.” Ecclesiastes 1:7

It’s never enough. If I open the door, I will not be filled. So I keep it closed—closed to the good, closed to the bad, closed to the beautiful and to the ugly. Those times when I did let the river of wonder flow into me—treading water in the turquoise sea of Cinque Terre, or watching the sun rise out of the ocean on a deserted beach in Australia—it wasn’t enough. The next day, I wanted more. Back home in Southern California, I lay on the beach in Malibu and ache for Cinque Terre. The sea of my heart is never full.

I open myself to streams of pain—loving those who will not love me back, allowing myself to feel something for strangers with haunted faces like open wounds—and the streams never stop rushing in. Anxiety, fear, anger all run from endless springs so that if I let them, they too will never stop—and my heart will never say “enough.”

I collect and hoard and pile and stash: friends, security, compliments, affection, approval. No matter how much I have, I’ll find another corner, a trap door, a cubby to fill. The tide rises and the sea threatens to run past its boundaries, but it always recedes. There is always room for more, because there are always leaks—compassion quickly seeps out when I feel my rights have been violated; but anger can drain a little at the sight of an earnest, snuffling pug on his morning walk.

I’ve gotten clever with building dams, though, and most days I redirect the flow with a series of obstacles—a lot of music and podcasts and general noise, some vegetative time at the computer, lots of scurrying to and fro with errands, cleaning, assignments, social engagements. By the time the rivers get around all of these, their waters are a pitiful trickle that I collect in a small bucket, and it’s that bucket that gets full at the end of the day, when it threatens to spill over into frightened tears as I get ready for bed.

I sit and look down from my window, grim and bitter as a spinster, tracing the pattern of streams winding through the world and dumping into other hearts, other seas that will never be filled. And I wonder, which is my biggest fear—that the rivers will one day dry up and there will no longer be a chance for wonder, or even for heartbreak? Or that my heart really could be filled, that it could burst? Didn’t Jesus say that if we asked the Father, we would have joy like a river overflowing its banks? Didn’t he say that she who believes in him would have rivers of living water flowing from the very depths of her being?

Can the sea become the spring?

This little ditty ran in Fuller’s weekly student publication, the Semi, for a series on sexuality (for which very, very few women writers submitted articles).

One week after graduation, I found myself dancing in a campground bar outside of Paris with a bunch of Australians to that classic 90s jam, “Let’s Talk About Sex,” followed by a quick game of strip air hockey with a New Zealander named Matty. You’re probably thinking: this is where it gets interesting! Bible college grad explores her repressed sexuality in the backpacking scene of Europe…but you would be wrong. Again. I won that air hockey game, after removing only my earrings and my sandals (Matty may or may not have been down to his underthings). And the exploring I did over the next few years had little to do with men and a lot to do with traveling the world for missions and study and fun, discovering more about other people, other cultures, and God—and growing up a bit in the process.

But these things have a habit of resurfacing, and once I was done traveling and settled back in California, I entered the world of Fuller with its ecumenical diversity and gender-inclusive policy. I was so accustomed to using “he” and “men” for all humankind, including myself, that it took me awhile to realize how empowering it was to include both genders in our speech, our writing, and especially in our reading of the Scriptures. Replacing “he” with “she” in some verses about discipleship or God’s love opened up the world to me—I was no longer on the outside looking in, I was invited to get in the game. I started to ask questions and offer comments in class, I no longer hid my intelligence as I did in Bible college, and I began to understand the way it made me feel to be called a “girl” versus a “woman” (hint: boo versus yes).

As an intelligent woman, I returned to some matters left untouched since my high school and college years. I was single and trying to figure out what to do with this sexuality that was supposed to have been activated at 22 if I had married a few weeks after graduation, like a good Bible college student. Sexuality seems to be a given for men, but is still a closed topic for many Christian women. Gathering the moxie I’d collected in my empowering moments of feminism at Fuller, I opened the door and invited myself into the conversation. What does it mean to be 26 and single? I wondered. What if I never get married? How does a promise ring help me then? I knew by now that my perfect prince probably slipped up somewhere way before he turned 26, and I felt cheated. I brought up these questions among friends and acquaintances and discovered that some weren’t ready for that kind of talk, but also found that I’m not alone. I had a conversation recently with a 35-year-old friend who is single, and she’s wondering lately if she’s wasted the past couple of decades with her sexuality on the shelf. Maybe it’s time to take it down and see what happens?

But it’s not even about measuring purity points with a future spouse, it’s realizing that we are not only spiritual, physical, intelligent, emotional beings—we are also sexual beings. And I did not have a clue what that meant. Some things have helped—especially my exposure to Catholicism and other traditions that were quite foreign to me before arriving at Fuller. It wasn’t until this year that I realized how wide is the chasm between my sexuality and my spirituality. In my classes and reading, I’ve been fascinated by glimpses of an earthy spirituality where the body is as much a meeting place with the divine as the mind or the soul—where the three, in fact, are blurred and joined much more than compartmentalized or cordoned off from each other. Last summer in Italy I was still as single as ever, but I immersed myself in the sensuality that marks the citizens of the hilltop Umbrian town of Orvieto—feeling the buzz of wine or espresso in my veins, rich truffle oil and sweet gelato on my tongue, St. Francis’s brother Sun caressing my shoulders. Somehow, these were steps in my journey.

So here I am—not far from where I started, but I have a rucksack over my shoulder and I threw out the maps I received as a child (I Kissed Dating Goodbye and DC Talk’s “I Don’t Want It”). The cartographers of Christian sexuality—at least the Evangelical ones—led me nowhere, but told me to stay in one place and be a good girl until a nice man came and found me. However, I am not interested in going the way of the mainstream, non-Christian world, either, who tell me that God is too big, too slow, too out-of-touch to bring along on these travels. I can’t explain it, and I can’t even say I’ve yet experienced it, but I know that He is the guide and companion that I want, and that in these uncharted wanderings, He is a safe place to camp.

But. I just have to say to that voice in my head, and to you, if you’re wondering: I AM writing. I’m writing papers all the time, my job is a writing position, and I journal several times a week. So there. (I just stuck out my tongue but you can’t see it).

I’ve got some ideas rolling around in my head…I just need to find a time when I’m not so mentally drained so I can write them down! I’ll be back soon. Promise.

Breaking news: my big sister, Sarah, started a blog, “Poodles Doing Yoga.” Sarah is a high school teacher working with at-risk teens in the ‘hood of Long Beach; she also is currently crazy about yoga, sewing, and starting her 30s off right by living “out of the box.” Long-time loves include reality television, cardigans, gossip magazines, and poodles (which is a given, for our family). Sarah is unflinchingly honest, and is an expert at giving a hilarious and dramatic spin to everyday life.

I’m sure that Poodles Doing Yoga will provide a regular dose of real-girl humor and insight…check it out! For future reference, I’ve added Poodles Doing Yoga to the blogroll, so you can always get to it from there. Enjoy! (Oh, and also, maybe try to picture a poodle doing a downward-dog pose…it’s pretty funny).

“Lachrimae Amantis” by Geoffrey Hill

What is there in my heart that you should sue

so fiercely for its love? What kind of care

brings you as though a stranger to my door

through the long night and in the icy dew

seeking the heart that will not harbor you,

that keeps itself religiously secure?

At this dark solstice filled with frost and fire

your passion’s ancient wounds must bleed anew.

So many nights the angel of my house

has fed such urgent comfort through a dream,

whispered, “your lord is coming, he is close”

that I have drowsed half-faithful for a time

bathed in pure tones of promise and remorse:

“tomorrow I shall wake to welcome him.”

I am slowly beginning to reconnect with myself. Which is great, but I feel sad that I seem incapable of doing this when my life is stressful and overwhelming. It’s weird that my automatic response is to shut down, to disconnect. Observing Lent has been a shock to my system, keeping me awake and open and painfully aware.

I’m realizing that this is the first time I’ve ever really observed Lent. I’ve fasted a few times, but I didn’t “get it.” Two things are helping me now: first, I’ve been reading a collection of reflections on Lent called Bread and Wine. Superb. Second, I’ve been memorizing Psalm 51—that’s the one attributed to King David, after he had an affair with Bathsheba and then had her husband killed. Both are beginning to show me that Lent is a stripping away, bit by bit, to the naked truth of the soul that is crouching in a dirty pile of selfishness, greed, pride, and rebellion. I liked what I read about it today:

“The reason Lent is so long is that this path to the truth of oneself is long and snagged with thorns, and at the very end one stands alone before the broken body crowned with thorns upon the cross. All alone—with not one illusion or self-delusion to prop one up. Yet not alone, for the Spirit of holiness, who is also the Spirit of helpfulness, is beside you and me.” (Edna Hong)

Another writer in Bread and Wine put it this way: “We travail. We are heavy laden. Refresh us, O homeless, jobless, possession-less Savior. You came naked, and naked you go. And so it is for us. So it is for all of us.” (Barbara Cawthorne Crafton)

Hong later quotes G.K. Chesterton: “I have found only one religion that dares to go down with me into the depth of myself.” Hong says, “…it is true. No other religion dares to take me down to the new beginning.” (Emphasis mine)

I love that—the descent to the new beginning—because it’s the Holy Spirit who does it. The Spirit who makes old things new, and also who is the only one deeper than our depth, who can get to our “innermost being” and the “hidden part” where God desires truth and wisdom (Psalm 51:6) And that’s what Psalm 51 is doing for me…it’s stripping away my pride, taking me to the gaping hole at the bottom of my being where I try to hide my darkness. But everyday, I come to Psalm 51 and it is a mirror to me, saying, “Take a look at your darkness. It has always been there, it is never going away—you need help.”

And Lent is all about descending, and staying down, crawling on the sea floor under the inky black pressure so that on Holy Saturday—after death has been defeated—we see a ray of light cutting through the waters. We swim up to it, and it carries us like a vertical current so that on Easter Sunday we burst into the sunlight, gasping for breath, but laughing too. And we squint at the sparkling green waters, and we’re shocked to discover that clutched in our fists is the joy of our salvation—restored, golden, set with rubies.

There were three people imposing ashes, one for each section of the auditorium. The woman on the left marked thin, neat lines on the brow of each patron, while those who approached the man on the right came away with tidy, miniature smudges, more like large dots than crosses. But us sinners in the center got the full treatment—you’d think the minister was using three fingers to smear the ash all over our foreheads. We looked dirty and tired, like little newsies or chimney sweeps.

A foreign vulnerability hung in the air, an unspoken sense of, “Ah, yes, this is who we really are.” Brokenhearted, bewildered, wandering. I noticed others shyly checking out everyone else, like junior highers in their underwear in the locker room.

“Do I have to keep this on all day?” I wondered, and asked myself again, later, when I looked into the bathroom mirror at work and saw not only a blackened forehead, but smudges on my cheekbones and nose as well—I must have brushed my hair out of my eyes and spread the ash. But I determined to keep it on, for this is who I really am. I preen and groom myself to appear put together, but today the truth—that I’m still undone—is what greets everyone I meet.

A few days ago, I was really trying to figure out this whole Lent business. I thought I should “give something up” for it, but it’s not as easy as saying “chocolate” and being done with it—my relationship with food is too complicated to try and mix that with penitence. A fast would easily become a secret diet strategy or subtle self-punishment.

Then I considered giving up my lunch-time iced tea, but immediately recoiled at the thought, then promptly decided such a strong negative reaction means I really must give it up. In a desperate attempt to protect my little midday refreshment ritual, I began to wonder, What’s Lent all about anyway? As a Pentecostal, I probably didn’t hear about it until my twenties. I know that Lent is about preparing for Easter, and apparently the forty days of fasting are symbolic of Jesus’s forty days of temptation in the wilderness. But that period of temptation was before he began his public ministry—over three years prior to his death.

So what did Jesus do forty days before his death, before his resurrection? And, perhaps just as important for me, what did his disciples do beforehand, as we all know that my “dying” to an Oreo craving just isn’t the same as his death that redeemed the world.

Based on the story we have, it looks like Jesus’s disciples, during this time, hung out with him. They squabbled over who would be first in his kingdom, and they wondered who would be the one to betray him. They ate and drank with him—they slept and sailed and walked. They let him wash their feet and one even leaned against his chest and heard his heartbeat. They refused to believe when he predicted that they would abandon him, and they fell asleep when he asked them to keep watch. They listened, interrupted, watched, waited, doubted, deserted, and one lopped a guy’s ear off.

Jesus tried to prepare them, but they were bumblers to the end. What makes me think I’m any different? Do I assume that if I give up cookies or Facebook or iced tea, God will be obligated to draw near to me? Do I think that such a fast is a foolproof recipe for a broken and contrite heart?

This morning, someone called Lent “a season of mindfulness,” and that’s what I want most—to be mindful of my grasping for control, of how deep and manipulative it is, so that it even dons the disguise of penitent fasting. I want to be mindful of my own dirty beginnings and messy existence, of others’ shame and vulnerability, and of our bottomless needs.

I pray that I will come to Easter, not victorious over a successful fast, but broken over my inadequacy to defend the helpless, to share with the hungry, to love the stranger. And I hope that in my brokenness, I will know that when my forehead is black with ash and when I doubt and desert him, Jesus still lays down his life, and Easter still comes.