Not a Glow Up
I am an avid podcast listener, and recently I have been listening to and reading more of Kate Bowler's content.
One such post stopped me and I have not been able to get it out of my head. Bowler is sitting in her office, looking at the camera, as she shares what I would call a Lenten reality check. It takes 42 seconds for her to remind us that Lent is not a glow up, it's not a reset, it's not 40 days to get it together. She goes on to say, "If it promises relief or closure or emotional resolution, that is not Lent."
As someone who routinely avoids endings and sad stories because the real world gives us enough of that and I don't need it in my fiction, there is something about Lent that I deeply love and appreciate. From Ash Wednesday to Good Friday, I find myself more at home in this season than at any other time of the church year. Not because I don't love Easter and Christmas, or the beauty of day-in-and-day-out of the Ordinary Season, but because there is a gritty realness to Lent that gives us breathing space.
Bowler puts it this way: "It started with dirt. You are finite, and that is not a problem to be solved."
Our very nature as humans is not a problem to be solved.
She didn't pull this out of her own brilliance--Bowler's compassionate truth-telling is rooted in scripture. Even as God exiles the first humans from Eden (Gen 3:19), God promises that in the midst of their grief and suffering they still belong to God, who made them from the dirt of the earth and who breathed the breath of Life into them.
In Psalm 103:14-15, King David remembers God's goodness to all God's people: "13 As a father has compassion for his children, so the Lord has compassion for those who fear him. 14 For he knows how we were made; he remembers that we are dust."
The world tempts us into believing that our humanity can be fixed or solved, but scripture tells us the truth of who God is and who we are as God's beloveds.
We are finite, and this is not a problem to be solved.
From Kate Bowler, A Blessing for When There's No Cure for Being Human
God, I feel it again, the burden of being human, and the fact that nothing will exempt us from the pain of it.
Wherever you go, you bear yourself, and always find yourself.
– Thomas a Kempis, The Imitation of Christ, transl. Leo Shirley-Price, 1952.
Blessed are we, Your human creatures,
with mind and soul and spirit bounded in flesh and bone,
struggling in the seeming conspiracy against progress,
against the perfection that our minds can grasp and our hearts long for.
God, how we yearn for the completion of all things.
and we try, oh how we try to hurry it along
with our self-help elixirs,
slurries with a touch of truth and a handful of goodness, enough to be effective, for awhile.
The gospel of hustle, or of positivity, or peloton
But then life happens and we realize all over again that we are human, frail and finite,
and that there’s no cure for that, despite illusory promises that say otherwise.
this is where we live, in this reality.
Come help us in our humanity. help us enjoy all the beauty that is here, the sweetness that comes to us unbidden. The light that gives us eyes to see.
It’s not all up to us, thank heaven.