Tomorrow the season of Lent begins. And I will be celebrating. 

I never used to celebrate Lent. I didn’t grow up in church. My mother, though a lifelong Episcopalian, was agnostic during much of my childhood, and my father considered himself an atheist — at least that’s how he expressed himself every time I asked him. 

As a six-year-old child, I came to believe in the existence of God on my own by looking at the Blue Ridge Mountains which were right outside our door. Later as a teenager, I had a near death experience, when for no reason I can explain, I asked Jesus “please don’t let me die.”  The next moment after that cry, I was freed from a death trap.  Those are stories for another time. What matters here is that even then I didn’t become a Christian. I believed there was a reality to God and Jesus, but I didn’t think Christians knew what that was. Christianity as a religion felt dead to me. However, eventually as a young adult I found my way into a community of faith that felt alive. It was a very down to earth place. A place where I, who grew up as a hippie child, could feel at home and accepted as I was. Yet even then I didn’t celebrate Lent. Because I wasn’t looking for religion in those days, I was looking for reality, and the little church I came to call home was not big on the ecclesiastical calendar.

It wasn’t until I moved back to my hometown after over 20 years away that I celebrated Lent for the first time. My mother told me she was giving up alcohol for Lent, and I decided to join her. Neither of us were heavy drinkers, more like “an occasional wine or beer with dinner” drinkers, but it felt like a refreshing spiritual exercise to let it go completely for the month and a half of Lent.  I did that for a few years, but since it wasn’t a deep tradition for me, not one I’d grown up in (having grown up in no religious tradition at all), I was not “religious” about it. Yet Lent began to be a time in my life that I at least took note of what I might need to let go of. 

Fifteen or 16 years later in late 2023, feeling deep concerns about the survival of democracy, I asked a few friends if they wanted to pray together for our democracy during Lent 2024. My friends were from around the US. Having spent years in international work, I had come to know people of faith from all over the world, including from all over my own nation. A small band of us formed a private Facebook group and began talking about our concerns — our loneliness in our communities of faith, and our feelings of cognitive dissonance as those around us treated us as heretics for speaking out about deeply problematic words and actions of political leaders. 

For myself, having worked internationally, I was particularly concerned about dehumanizing language used against migrant populations. My own life had been given to helping immigrants. In the mid 1990s, I volunteered to help Jewish refugees leaving the former Soviet Union where rising anti-semitism was a real issue, far too reminiscent of pogroms of the past. Later, I left my job in the private sector, and moved to China. The city I moved to was a miserable place in many ways. An industrial city — you could small and see the air. It was just south of Mongolia, and had brutal winters. The year I moved there we experienced both record cold and record snow.  I had my choice to go there or to the “land of eternal spring” in the south. I wanted to go south, but when I heard of the plight of North Korean refugees, who escaped to China to find food amidst famine in North Korea, I had no choice. I went to the north. I would spend 2 years living in China, and then another 10 in the US mobilizing help for the North Korean people, and for groups helping them.

I left that work in 2012, but my heart didn’t leave it. I have always loved my immigrant and multicultural neighbors. Always. From my multicultural neighborhood in DC as a child, to teaching ESL to Korean exchange students in high school, to a best friend  in my twenties for whom English was a second language, to the dear sweet Eastern European Jewish family I helped settle, to the North Korean people I met with who told me of a famine so severe that they knew of a woman who had hallucinated and ate her own baby thinking it was a pig. 

You may be tempted to stop reading now, especially after that last sentence. But  if so, I encourage you to sit with your discomfort for a bit. That last sentence is important precisely because it is extremely uncomfortable to hear of suffering that intense — so intense that you feel you have to look away, that you don’t want to think about its existence. This discomfort is described in a famous passage from the ancient world:

“He was despised and rejected by mankind, a man of suffering, and familiar with pain. Like one from whom people hide their faces he was despised, and we held him in low esteem”^[1]

This was the type of suffering that Jesus of Nazareth endured. He, an innocent man, was treated like a common criminal. He, a good man, died an excruciatingly painful death. He, who did nothing wrong, experienced the kind of suffering that we don’t like to think about, that we don’t like to look on. And here is the really uncomfortable part for those of us who profess to follow Jesus (please do stay with me): to the extent that we are unwilling to look on the pain of those wrongfully detained, of those who are strangers in our land, of those who are poor and thus without adequate nutrition, shelter and clothing, to the extent we close our eyes to them, we are unwilling to look at Jesus. If we will truly be followers of Jesus, we will look at Him in the face of our neighbors, and we will love them. When we do not, we still do not see Jesus. 

Which brings me back to Lent. Lent is the season where we remember the last days of Jesus’ life culminating in the crucifixion. I am praying for our democracy this year, as I have for the past two Lent seasons. I am doing so not primarily as a political act, but because the ideals of our democracy are the same ideals I hold as a believer and a follower of Jesus: Jesus is found on the margins of society. He is found among the suffering of the world, not among the powerful.^[2] Can the powerful find him? Yes, with great difficulty. Why great difficulty? Because he himself said we must humble ourselves and become like little children.^[3] The more we have, the more difficult humility becomes, the more we are tempted to say “my own strength has given me this."^[4]

And this is where Lent comes in. Lent is a traditional time of fasting and surrender. It is a time of repentance, and repentance, rightly understood, is about having the humility to change our minds. This change of mind is not primarily about changed behaviors, though I would argue those always result, because we are always imperfect. Instead our change of mind is a profound realization that our action or inaction hurts another, another who like ourselves is created in the image of God,^[5] and like ourselves is imperfect. It is a change of mind that compels us away from hate and toward love — love for God, love for our neighbor, and (God give us strength) love for our enemies. It is a love that is not empty words alone, but is a living reality which shows itself actions.^[6]

I welcome people of conscience to join me this year — people of Christian faith, people of other faiths and those of no faith. Let us find strength to act on behalf of our neighbors in need. May we be willing to open our eyes to the suffering of others. May we give up our own comfort, our own security, our own safety in order to protect the most vulnerable in our midst. Regardless of faith or lack thereof, those of you who are standing with those on the margins are doing the work that Jesus left us with, and thereby you are my brothers and my sisters. You are my community. I will gladly sit at your tables, and invite you to mine. 

And if you are not yet giving yourself on behalf of the poor in a sun scorched land,^[7] let this be your invitation. 

Join us!

---

[1] Isaiah 53:3 (NIV, emphasis mine)

[2] Can the rich and powerful find Him too? Well, He said that it was easier for a “camel to go through the eye of the needle,” but also that “with God all things are possible.”  Luke 18:25-27

[3] Mathew 18:33.

[4] Deuteronomy 18:26

[5] James 3:8-12

[6] 1 John 3:18 tells us to love “in deed” (actions) and “truth” (living reality)

[7] Isaiah 58:10-11

Photo credit: Margaret McNett Burruss. Butterflies are symbols of transformation and are themselves migrants.