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.

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.

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.

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.

This Tuesday was the feast of the Conversion of St. Paul the Apostle, celebrating the famous day on which the zealous man known as Saul, a ferocious persecutor of the earliest churches, was struck blind by a light blazing brighter than the sun on the road to Damascus, cast down to the ground by a voice crying out: “Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting me? It hurts you to kick against the goads.” (Acts 26:14) Saul’s whole identity is transformed, down to his very name: Saul the persecutor becomes Paul the apostle, fostering the growth of the new Christian churches around the Mediterranean as zealously as he’d once tried to destroy them.

As a paradigm for spiritual life it’s a bit imposing. While there are many examples of profound change in the lives of Christians all around the world, few of our stories are nowhere near as dramatic as Paul’s. Our paths have fewer sudden swerves and many more gentle turns, and when they do begin to meander in another direction, it rarely comes with such clear signs, with blazing lights and booming voices and traveling companions, fallen to the ground.

We don’t all have Paul’s kind of conversion. But we do all need to be converted.

Not “converted” in the sense of “converting” from one religion to another, but in the sense of what the Christian monastic traditional calls “conversion of life.” “Conversion,” writes Brother Curtis Almquist, SSJE, “is about our life-long turning and returning to Christ.” It is not a matter of self-denial, of giving up the things that are best about ourselves, but of pruning, of trimming away the things that are preventing us from living fully in God’s love, of “co-operating with how Jesus wants to set us free.”

Blinded by the light, Paul is unable to see until he meets Ananias, one of the very Christian disciples whom Paul had been headed to Damascus to persecute. God urges Ananias, despite his (reasonable) skepticism, to go to Paul, and when he does, he lays his hands on him and greets him, this persecuting enemy, as “Brother.” “Brother Saul,” he says, “the Lord Jesus, who appeared to you on your way here, has sent me so that you may regain your sight and be filled with the Holy Spirit.” And immediately, famously, “something like scales fell from his eyes, and his sight was restored.” (Acts 9:17-18)

“What needs to be changed in us?” asks the nun and spiritual writer Joan Chittister, OSB. “Anything that deludes us into thinking that we are not simply a work in progress, all of whose degrees, status, achievements, and power are no substitute for the wisdom that a world full of God everywhere, in everyone has to teach us.”

These things are like so many scales, obscuring our vision. They prevent us from seeing God face to face. They prevent us from seeing our neighbors, near and far, as the beloved children of God. They prevent us from seeing ourselves, in fact, as the beloved children of God. And in proclaiming his unconditional love for us—in declaring that we are beloved, whatever our achievements or failures, weaknesses or strengths—Jesus invites us to yield to God’s grace, to the Holy Spirit’s slow work of converting us as we all walk roads that stretch beyond Damascus to the very ends of our days.

O God, who by the preaching of your apostle Paul has caused the light of the Gospel to shine throughout the world: Grant, we pray, that we, having his wonderful conversion in remembrance, may show ourselves thankful to you by following his holy teaching; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.