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The Great Litany

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We’ll mark the beginning of the season of Lent this Sunday’s by beginning our service with what’s known as ‘The Great Litany,’ a long series of prayers and petitions with sung responses. While it was originally intended for use every Sunday morning (and on Wednesdays and Fridays!) in more recent times it’s mostly been used as a Lenten tradition, either on the Sundays in Lent, or on the first Sunday in Lent, or simply not at all! Douglas tells me it hasn’t been sung at St. John’s since time immemorial, so I thought I’d take the chance to write a few words about the Litany today.

A ”litany” is simply a kind of prayer in which a leader reads (or a cantor sings) a number of petitions, to which the people give a repeating response. If you’re not familiar with the Great Litany, you’ll probably recognize litanies in general as one of the fairly common forms for the Prayers of the People, for example Form I:

With all our heart and with all our mind, let us pray to the Lord, saying “Lord, have mercy.”

For the peace of the world, for the welfare of the Holy Church of God, and for the unity of all peoples, let us pray to the Lord.
Lord, have mercy.

For our Bishop, and for all the clergy and people, let us pray to the Lord.
Lord, have mercy.

“The Litany” with a capital “L” was among the very first services used in English, rather than in Latin, during the earliest days of the reformation of the Church of England (first published in 1544, it predates even the first Book of Common Prayer!), and it became a cornerstone of Anglican liturgy. A typical Sunday’s services would consist of Morning Prayer, the Litany, and the Liturgy of the Word from the service of Holy Communion (although usually not actually communion, for reasons I may write about another time!), followed by a break for lunch, followed by catechesis for the children and a service of Evening Prayer in the late afternoon. As the patience of both clergy and parishioners wore thin over the years, the service was typically streamlined—especially in the wild world of the Americas!—such that a typical Sunday morning became merely Morning Prayer, or later simply the Eucharist, and the Litany dropped out of regular use.

The Litany, you may noticed on Sunday, is something of an odd duck. Its theology is not always entirely in line with the rest of our liturgies, or indeed with some of our own personal beliefs! You may notice an emphasis on wickedness and punishment that seems downright medieval, and indeed it is, reflecting as it does a particular moment in the transition between medieval, reformed, and modern theology. It only takes one hearing of some of the petitions to understand why it’s often relegated to Lent, and to one Sunday at that (e.g., “From all evil and wickedness; from sin; from the crafts and assaults of the devil; and from everlasting damnation, / Good Lord, deliver us”; “From all false doctrine, heresy, and schism; from hardness of heart, and contempt of thy Word and commandment, / Good Lord, deliver us,” et al).

But there’s a power in the Litany, at least for me, at least this year. While its structure and verbiage have been tweaked somewhat over the generations, it still fundamentally captures the concerns of people praying five hundred years ago. And while their theology or worldview may be somewhat different from yours, their fears and anxieties are not.

We live in a time of climate change and global pandemic, and we pray with our siblings in Christ across five centuries: “From lightning and tempest; from earthquake, fire, and flood; from plague, pestilence, and famine, / Good Lord, deliver us.”

We watch in horror as Putin’s Russia reenacts the foreign policy of Hitler’s Germany, wreaking havoc on dense urban areas with missiles and rocket artillery, and we pray with ancestors long gone who lived through the Blitz: “From all oppression, conspiracy, and rebellion; from violence, battle, and murder; and from dying suddenly and  unprepared, / Good Lord, deliver us.”

We pray for faithful church leaders, and just politicians; for the homeless and the hungry, for women in childbirth and for children; for the lonely, and the suffering, and the departed, and for all the world.

And as strive to keep our balance amidst the storms of this world, we cry out to God, “That it may please thee to strengthen such as do stand; to comfort and help the weak-hearted; to raise up those who fall; and finally to beat down Satan under our feet, / We beseech thee to hear us, good Lord.”

(Whatever you think of Satan, that’s undoubtedly one of the baddest lines in the history of prayer.)

If the years 2020, 2021, and 2022 have taught me anything, it’s that the distance between our lives and those of the past is fairly small. Medicine and technology and the United Nations have made incredible strides in improving the wellbeing of human beings as a whole; yet we live, as we have always lived, in a world that is full of suffering, disaster, war, and pain. Which is, of course, the same world in which we have always lived, a world that is full of love, compassion, and courage; a world that is full of the presence of God.

“The Light of the World”

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“The Light of the World”

 
 
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Sermon — February 27, 2022

The Rev. Greg Johnston

Lectionary Readings

As somebody whose mood mostly revolves around the weather, I can’t stand the kind of overcast skies we’ve been having recently. But as a college newspaper photographer, I loved them. For three years in college, I was a staff photographer and then a photography editor for The Harvard Crimson, an amateur managing amateurs shooting photos for the only daily newspaper in Cambridge, and I very quickly learned about the paradox of light.

In low light, of course, the camera can barely capture anything. If you’re taking candid photos of some visiting scholar at a dimly-lit evening lecture, you can’t just use a flash like a paparazzo. Your only options are to reduce the shutter speed to let in more light (and making your photo blurrier) or to increase the film speed to capture more light (and make your photos grainier). And while printing photos onto newsprint gives you a certain amount of wiggle room—ink bleeds, after all—the digital era takes it all away.

Outdoor events are much better. You have all the light you need. In fact, it’s often too much light. A sunny day is hard for photographers, too. The rays of the sun, coming from a single point, tend to cast harsh shadows. The nose creates a black triangle across the cheek. The bags under the eyes deepen. And the range between the bright highlights and the dark shadows can be hard to capture. Hand the newspaper over to a bunch of freshman photographers on a sunny day, and it looks like The Phantom of the Opera; half the subject’s face is covered in a white mask of over-exposure.

But a cloudy day is photojournalist heaven. A cloudy sky acts like the celestial version of one of those white umbrellas you’ll see in a studio, diffusing the power of the sun. You no longer have a single light source shining down and casting shadows. In fact, on a really overcast day, when the sky’s not just filled with clouds but uniformly grey, it’s as if your subject is illuminated from every direction at once with a soft light, giving you crisp, glowing photos with absolutely no skill required.

This, by the way, is why you’d never want to go on a first date in an airport bathroom. (Well, there are several reasons.) The harsh overhead lights show you exactly as you are; and then some. But the gentle glow of a romantic restaurant, with soft lighting from above and candles from below, shows you in, quite literally, your best light, better than you looked ten years ago on a good day.

Well, you have come to church, not to a photography class (or an airport bathroom), and you’re presumably here to hear about God, not mood lighting. So let me put it this way: while there are many ways to understand who Jesus is and what he does, one school of thought is to say this: Jesus is “the light of the world”; (John 9:5) and he shows us in two very different lights.

One of them is like the harsh light of the sun: beautiful and necessary for our life and growth; unflattering and dangerous to behold with our bare eyes. This is the divine light that shines out of Moses’ face when he comes down from Mount Sinai, fearful to behold. It’s a light so brilliant that you might almost describe it as “sharp.” Indeed, the Book of Exodus literally says something like “his face sprouted horns of light.” (Ex. 34:29) It’s an odd phrase, and indeed it’s the source of a misunderstanding in medieval art, because while every other ancient translator of the Bible ignored the image and simply translated “his face was shining” or something similar, Jerome, who translated the Bible into Latin, included the bit about horns. He was fluent in Hebrew, he understood that it was just a poetic turn of phrase, but his later readers did not, leading to a thousand years of Western art that depicts Moses with little goat horns on his head. Which is not the point.

The point is that Moses doesn’t just glow with a peaceful, heavenly light. He radiates light in beams so sharp they piece the soul. It’s a symbol of the soul-piercing power of the Law, which he delivers with his face uncovered, the Law whose perfect precepts show human beings exactly as they are. “Love the Lord your God with all your heart, and all your soul, and all your might,” (Deut. 6:5) shines forth, and the shadows begin to appear; and “you shall love your neighbor as yourself,” (Lev. 19:18) and our imperfections become clear. In the bright light of God’s word, none of us look very good.

And indeed, it’s with such light that Jesus appears when he is transfigured in prayer. “The appearance of his face changed,” Luke writes—get the reference?—“and his clothes became dazzling white,” (Luke 9:29) and again (not to make this an ancient-language seminar) the literal sense of the words is important: “his clothes were white,” Luke writes, “flashing like lightning.” What sharper beam of concentrated light could there be than a bolt of lightning?

And like the Law given to Moses, Jesus’ life is full of love so perfect as to be unflattering for the rest of us. It’s a self-sacrificial, unconditional, patient, peaceful love; a love that loves not only its friends and neighbors but its enemies, as you may recall. This love is an ideal to which we can all aspire, but by whose measure we inevitably fall short. And so Jesus’ light, like Moses’ light, illuminates our flaws. His brightness deepens our shadows. The lightning that flashes from his very clothing stuns his closest followers; even the most holy saints can’t stand before it.

But Jesus shows us in another light, as well, because he is not only the bright sun, but the cloudy sky; not only the shining Word of God, but the veil that softens its radiance. He doesn’t just dazzle Peter and James and John with his light, he brings them into the cloud that buffers it, and they hear the voice of God speaking to them from within. (Luke 9:34-35)

In Jesus, God became human. He faced temptation, and pain, and he knows what it is like to be a human being suffering, and has nothing but empathy and compassion for us. Jesus chooses to become the veil or the cloud or the umbrella that softens the harsh light of his own perfection, and the light of God’s law of love that highlights our flaws by contrast becomes the soft and loving light of God that shows us at our best.

People sometimes say that when God looks at you, God sees Jesus. And this is meant to be a reassurance about divine judgment and divine mercy: God doesn’t see and condemn your imperfect self, God sees and loves Christ in you. But of course, God sees us, God knows us, and God loves us. It’s just that God has chosen to see us in the light of Christ: in the bright light that shows how far from Jesus’ sacrificial love we really are, but ultimately in the soft light that shows us at our best.

And that light, if you take St. Paul’s word for it, not only shows us at our best; it begins to transform us into our best.

I’ll just say up front, be careful about Paul’s interpretation of the veil and the reading of the Law in this passage from Second Corinthians. It deserves a longer aside than I’m going to give it about inter-faith relations. If you read it a certain way, you can draw out some implications about Judaism that are condescending or even dangerous. I’ll just say now that it’s helpful to remember that Paul isn’t a Christian criticizing Jews; he’s a Jewish author, writing to the leaders of a mostly-Jewish religious community, about the way other Jewish religious leaders read the Bible they all share, and he writing without knowing the legacy of Christian violence against Jews that would eventually come.

What interests me, though, is Paul’s idea that seeing this divine light transforms us into that light; that seeing the image of the glory of God, as if it were reflected in a mirror, transforms us into that same image. That it’s not just that God has chosen to see us in our best light, that God chooses to see us at our best and therefore forgives us. It’s that seeing us at our best is what begins to transform us.

It’s almost like the romantic lighting on a first date in that dimly-lit restaurant, which has the power not only to show us in our best light, but—by bringing us into a relationship with someone who will bring out the best in us—has the power actually to make us better. (And, to be clear: I mean it makes us better people, not better-looking people.)

This kind of light doesn’t work by hiding our flaws, but by revealing the goodness of our true selves beneath the exterior. And it’s that light that God chooses to shine on us, not only seeing us in our best light but by making us into our best selves. “Therefore,” Paul writes, since it is by God’s mercy that we are engaged in this ministry, we do not lose heart.” (2 Cor. 4:1) Since it is by God’s mercy that we, all of us, are engaged in this ministry—in this Christian journey of love—we do not lose heart, because we know that God sees us in that loving, forgiving, transforming light. “And all of us, with unveiled faces, seeing the glory of the Lord as though reflected in a mirror, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another; for this comes from the Lord, the Spirit.” (2 Cor. 3:18) Amen.

Burying Alleluias and Burning Palms

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This Sunday after church, we’ll carry out two of my favorite pre-Lenten traditions: burying our Alleluias and burning palms to make ashes for Ash Wednesday. Neither is strictly necessary, or even officially recommended. But both are very fun.

You probably know that we banish the word “Alleluia” (or its older Hebrew form, “Hallelujah!”) from our liturgy and music during the season of Lent. The word simply means, “Praise the Lord!” and we do, indeed, continue praising God during Lent. The omission of the word “Alleluia” marks Lent as a more somber and reflective season, one in which the focus shifts slightly toward mourning our imperfections rather than praising God’s glory. And indeed, it’s balanced during the season of Easter with extra Alleluias, not only in our hymns but in the liturgy itself, with extra Alleluias added to the dismissal at the end of every service.

It’s sad to see our Alleluias go. As one medieval bishop wrote, “We part from the ‘Alleluia’ as from a beloved friend.” So, since the medieval period, people have said “goodbye” to “Alleluia” in a variety of ways. This year, as we did last year, our children will decorate Alleluia banners, which we’ll bless and then carry in procession to be buried in the garden (or in a snowbank, as the case may be…) On Palm Sunday, we’ll “resurrect” our Alleluias again, transforming them into something new with which to celebrate Easter.

Last year’s Alleluia banners became altar hangings for an outdoor Easter service.

The ashes with which we mark Ash Wednesday, too, are the result of a transformation. The ashes are made from burned palm branches, mixed with holy oil. As with most things in church tradition, this has a practical and a symbolic purpose. The holy oil is the same holy oil used in baptism. In baptism, it symbolizes the seal of the Holy Spirit, anointing the newly-baptized as a joint-heir with Christ, the Anointed One. So on Ash Wednesday, the mixture of ashes and oil symbolizes our state as human beings: physical and yet spiritual; mortal and yet promised immortality; creatures dust, who will return to dust, and yet the holy and anointed ones of God. And, on a practical level, a little oil helps the ashes stick to your face.

The ashes could be any ashes. On the practical level, burning last year’s palms is just a way to save some money and, hey, dried-up old palm leaves will burn better than fresh ones. But for the ashes to be the burned remains of last year’s palms also creates a set of powerful symbolic links. We waved these branches last year while singing “All glory, laud, and honor to thee, Redeemer, King!” and greeting our Messiah with cries of “Hosanna! Blessed is He who comes in the name of the Lord!” They symbolize the hopes we have for deliverance; the hopes our spiritual ancestors had for independence, two thousand years ago.

And now, another year has passed. Our hopes and dreams for earthly salvation, for a king who’d ride into our city and fix our world, have not come true quite yet. The palm branches of our hoped-for royal procession have become the ashes of our own mortality.

It’s an ambivalent scene: festive and solemn, disappointing and fun. But I can’t help but notice that the bowl in which we’ll burn our hopes into ashes is the one in which we’ll light the New Fire at our Easter Vigil: that the oil with which we hoped to anoint a Savior now anoints our foreheads, too.

And the cycle of tradition continues: from the Alleluia-less Lent to the double-Alleluia Easter and back again; from palms to ashes, from dust to dust, from fire to fire again and again and again, reenacting the mystery of our salvation in every season of our lives.

Last year’s palms, ready to be burned!

“On Loving Our Enemies”

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Sermon — February 20, 2022

The Rev. Greg Johnston

Lectionary Readings

It’s been a week of love. On, Monday, Murray got a homemade Valentine and some cookies from a preschool friend, I baked Alice chocolate muffins, and Alice bought me not one but two varieties of pickles. (Spicy green bean and smoked okra, if you’re curious.) Then, this Sunday, we hear not one, not two, but three reflections on love in our collects and our readings.

“O Lord,” the Collect of the Day begins, “you have taught us that without love whatever we do is worth nothing: Send your Holy Spirit and pour into our hearts your greatest gift, which is love…without which whoever lives is accounted dead before you.” Love is truly the greatest gift of God; whether it’s romantic love, the love between family members or friends, or the love that we make manifest in the service of our neighbors, love is one of the most powerful forces in the world.

For “if you love those who love you,” Jesus says, “what credit is that to you?” (Wait. What?) “For even sinners love those who love them. If you do good to those who do good to you, what credit is that to you? For even sinners do the same… But love your enemies, do good, and lend, expecting nothing in return.” (Luke 6:32-35)

This is not the “Sunday after Valentine’s Day” kind of love.

“Love” is, of course, one of the core concepts of Christianity; you might even call it one of the key practices of our faith. It’s certainly been at the center of my faith. I remember reading the First Letter of John for the first time during college, at a time when I had a good friend who was struggling, and being struck by its beautiful account of love:  “Beloved, let us love one another, because love is from God; everyone who loves is born of God and knows God.Whoever does not love does not know God, for God is love.” (1 John 4:7–8) For whatever reason, I’d never grasped before how central “love” is to Christianity, and I can’t describe how comforting it was to hear that the love that was sustaining me as I tried to care for this friend was God’s love working in me. And I found that I was able to anchor my faith and my life in those Two Great Commandments that Jesus names from the Old Testament: “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind, and your neighbor as yourself.” (Luke 10:27) Wherever I went, and whatever I did, I knew that if I walked this road, loving and serving my neighbor, loving and serving God, I couldn’t go wrong.

It wasn’t for a couple of years that I realized I’d been tricked. Loving a friend in need, caring for a neighbor who needs help, these things are wonderful and important—but they are not the most difficult or the only forms of Christian love. After all, Jesus has a point. Loving those who love you is one thing; loving your enemies is another.

Because “love your enemies” doesn’t mean “have warm and fuzzy feelings about Vladimir Putin’s army massing on the borders of Ukraine.” It means desiring and working for the good for the person right here, in front of you, who has wronged you. Your enemy is not an abstract, faceless horde. It is the person you can’t stand, the one who takes up your headspace as you rehash old arguments and rehearse the ones to come. “Love your enemies,” Jesus says; “Forgive, and you will be forgiven.” (Luke 6:37) But sometimes, it can be hard to forgive. At the very same moment that I felt so comforted by the idea that my love for a friend was God’s love working in me, I was, at the very same time, utterly refusing to forgive another person, a family member who’d done something wrong. I was mulling and stewing and raging against this person, even as every day I fell more deeply in love with our loving God.

But if you ever think your family members have treated you badly, you might want to recall the story of Joseph. You may remember the details: Joseph, the youngest of twelve sons, betrayed by his brothers as a child and sold into slavery, rises with God’s help to the heights of Pharaoh’s administration in Egypt. Now there’s been a famine, and his brothers have come to Egypt for help, not realizing that he’s in charge, and while he takes his revenge, messing with them for a while, eventually his old love of his brothers rises to the surface.

“Joseph could no longer control himself,” the story goes, “before all those who stood by him, and he cried out, ‘Send everyone away from me… And he wept so loudly that the Egyptians heard it, and the household of Pharaoh heard it.Joseph said to his brothers, ‘I am Joseph. Is my father still alive?’ But his brothers could not answer him, so dismayed were they at his presence…[But he] said to his brothers, I am your brother, Joseph, whom you sold into Egypt… Do not be distressed” (Genesis 45:1–5) And he comforts them, and he provides for them, and he embraces them.

He loves his enemies; he blesses those who cursed him; and it is like “a good measure, pressed down, shaken together, running over,” put into his lap; “for the measure you give,” as Jesus says, “will be the measure you get back.” (Luke 6:38) And the most poignant moment of the story turns out not to be the moment when Joseph’s brothers bring their faith the bloody Technicolor Dream Coat, and he thinks his son has dead, but the moment when that son finally meets his brothers again and forgives.

The truth is, we all have the power to do what Joseph did. We have all been forgiven, and we can all forgive.

A few years ago I went to a preaching conference just outside Richmond, Virginia. and the keynote speaker, was a psychologist at Virginia Commonwealth University named Everett Worthington. Now, keynote speakers can be hit or miss. But this was a hit. Worthington was a psychologists, working at a public university, not a theologian or a pastor; but he was a Christian, and his work was a kind of ministry, because his academic specialty was the psychological study of forgiveness.

Now, it was a week-long conference, and I have more than one of his books still sitting on my shelf, but to a certain extent you can summarize what he had to say in a few key points.

First—and this is important—you can make the decision to forgive. Whether someone has apologized or not, whether they’re still alive or not, whether you’ve ever met them or not (imagine, here, the person who’s just cut you off in traffic!); whatever the case may be, you can choose to forgive. You don’t have a choice whether they wronged you. You don’t have a choice whether you felt angry or hurt; and you probably should have! But you do have a choice between forgiveness and unforgiveness; between ruminating and plotting revenge and forgiving and beginning to heal.

The actual emotional process of forgiveness takes much longer than this initial decision. It’s almost like painting a wall that’s been painted many times before: without replacing the feelings of anger, or pain, or frustration with this person, you add layers of empathy, or compassion, or love. You can start with a primer of empathy, remembering a time when you’ve needed forgiveness, remembering that you, too, are fallible. You can add a coat of prayers for their wellbeing, or even for their repentance and change. At the very least, in the most horrifying situations, sympathy, even pity, can do the trick; it must be so terrible to have a soul so twisted as theirs. Poor baby. But in any case the emotional work of forgiveness consists of gradually adding more layers onto that wall, until the color slowly shifts from the green and red of envy and anger to the pink and blue of love and, one day, peace.

And while there will sometimes be chips, flakes that show the layers of old color beneath, for the most part, you no longer have to look at that ugly wall every day.

I’ll be honest with you, I hate that this is the case. I wish that the Christian religion was about being right. That it was about me loving you, and you and me loving God, and all of us working together to build a world shaped by love; which is to say, a world where everyone held my opinions and lived according to my values and voted for my favorite politicians. I wish that Christ’s message of love were about how awesome I am when I am loving, and how terrible those people are who aren’t as accepting and loving as I.

But alas. Christianity is not a religion of perfection and good deeds. It’s a religion of forgiveness. And thank God for that, because I need it. “Forgive,” Jesus says, “and you will be forgiven,” (Luke 6:37) and it’s not a commandment or a burden or a judgment but an invitation and a gift. “Do not judge, and you will not be judged; do not condemn, and you will not be condemned. Forgive, and you will be forgiven.” Set yourself free from the burden of age-old wounds, and if you can’t—if loving even your enemies is just a bridge too far—then remember, always, that if God extends such love and forgiveness to her enemies, then she will surely, surely, forgive you, her beloved friend.

“O Lord, you have taught us that without love whatever we do is worth nothing: Send your Holy Spirit and pour into our hearts your greatest gift, which is love, the true bond of peace and of all virtue, without which whoever lives is accounted dead before you. Grant this for the sake of your only Son Jesus Christ, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.”

Giving Up (and Taking On) for Lent

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Giving Up (and Taking On) for Lent

I may be over-prepared in general, but I tend to crash into the beginning of Lent without giving it much thought. “What are you giving up?” someone inevitably asks me during the first week or so of the season. (Or some variation: “What are you taking on?” “What new spiritual practice are you trying?”) And I suddenly realize that, yet again, despite my best intentions, I haven’t figured it out yet. So, just in case you’ve ever found yourself in the same predicament, I thought I’d take the opportunity to say a few words about our Lenten fasts, a couple weeks before they begin.

First, a note on “giving things up” and “taking things on” for Lent: Recently, many people have found it helpful to frame Lent as an opportunity to take on something new and good, to cultivate a new habit or spiritual practice, rather than to give something up. And this is fine! Traditionally, fasting and almsgiving are two core focuses of Lent. One would take the money saved by fasting from certain items (wine, meat, chocolate) and give it instead to those in need, so “giving up” and “taking on” were linked. While many people prefer the positive connotations of taking on something new rather than giving something up, note that most of what I say below still applies!

With that said, three observations about Lent:

  1. Lenten fasting is not about giving up something bad. You can (and probably should!) do this any time of the year! Although Lent’s mood does tend to encourage us to avoid our various bad habits, this is isn’t a fast; it’s repentance. Lenten fasting is about giving up something good, something which we can joyfully receive again at Easter. (Hence the common practice of a reception after the Easter Vigil featuring chocolates and champagne!)
  2. Lenten fasting is not a project of self-improvement; it is a process of self-knowledge. It’s an exploration of the human will. Temporarily giving up something that’s otherwise good (or at least neutral) gives us an opportunity to observe how our minds and wills work. Say I decide to fast from social media during Lent. If I fail a few times, it’s not a very big deal. But it is a learning experience, an opportunity to observe the conditions under which my willpower grows weak. Is it when I’m bored? Tired? Lonely? What are the triggers that lead me to rationalize away my resolution and indulge in the thing I’ve promised to avoid? It turns out that for most of us, the same patterns apply to our more serious sins and bad habits; so by struggling against a minor foe, I’ve learned how to care for myself in the larger struggle against my more-deeply-engrained issues. In this sense, you can almost think of Lent as a workout for the soul: it’s an opportunity to strengthen your ability to resist true evil by practicing on things that just aren’t that important.
  3. God does not love you any more for keeping a perfect Lenten fast, nor does God love you any less for an imperfect one; and in fact, God may well be pleased to see the humility that comes with occasional failure! While to a certain extent our Lenten practices can strengthen our willpower, what they really do well is show us how weak the will can be. And the humility that comes with this realization opens us up to be grateful for God’s grace, for the promise of unconditional love we receive, no matter how imperfect we are.

Good Friday’s going to come, whether you give up everything you can all Lent and never fail, or rationalize and justify your way through every cheat. Your perfect control of every situation won’t be enough to save Jesus’ life. Your failures aren’t the reason that it’s ending. But these forty days of struggle are a chance to practice a more perfect imperfection; to risk looking into your own soul and observing its workings when dealing with the most trivial things, knowing that—however great your success or profound your failure to keep a holy Lent—Christ will rise again at the end of it.