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Editor’s Note: This essay also appears in The Line Issue 11.3 (March 2024); subscribe to The Line here.
My wife was raised on a Manitoba farm before the days of mechanization in those parts. Harry was the family’s workhorse, in advanced years during Micki’s childhood. But he still faithfully, if reluctantly, plodded out to work everyday, pulling the plow or the stoneboat, or, in winter, the cutter sled to take Micki and her brother to school in town. But when the chore was done and he could return home, his pace quickened, his mood brightened and he headed for home swiftly with cheerful anticipation.
Home has that meaning for us. It is one of the evocative terms in our language. It is like a salmon who swims the wide ocean for years, but is driven to return to her place of birth in a creek, with an inerrant memory to find that place, give birth to the next generation and then to die in the embrace of home. For humans, it can serve as a fixed point in an otherwise swirling life, where the parental home stands, where family inhabits the vicinity, with its familiar streets and landmarks, the school, the church, the familiar accents. For others, home has long ceased to be a fixed spot, but has ended up moving with them, like a nomad’s tent. Yet, even returning to that more temporary location, they can feel the glow of the familiar and perhaps the presence of loved ones.
Humans will even fight and die for their homeland, cheer for the home team, be a booster for the hometown, care deeply about that place. “As fair as these green foreign hills may be, they are not the hills of home,” as the Scottish soldiers song puts it.
Where is home for us, in this restless, rootless age? Modern times, even the current evening news, witness to enormous upheavals, whole populations driven from their homes, becoming refugees in unprecedented numbers. Those not victims of ethnic or political uprooting often find themselves forced (or lured) from home by economic devastation. Others fall victim to their own dreams, “the grass is always greener on the other side of the fence,” as in the case of the Prodigal Son.
“I am but a stranger here, heaven is my home,” sings the old Gospel song. Perhaps. But when I see the New Testament descriptions of heaven (in Revelation, mainly), they sound awesome, but it feels stranger than what I know of anywhere on earth. An incarnational Faith on a planet with a solid material existence has given us a sense of home that has a place name attached, a firmly grounded piece of real estate, with well remembered sights, sounds and smells. The point of creating the Garden for humans was precisely to give us our home, a place of spiritual purity and material satisfaction and substance. Our tragic loss of that home, still remembered in the collective memory, leaves us as wandering refugees, instinctively seeking that Paradise lost, like the salmon seeking her native creek, but without her success.
Lent is the season of the church year which has its focus on this. Lent is the celebration and enactment of our journey home.
Expelled from the Garden because of our failure to accept and be content with God’s perfect gift, we now live as pilgrims on a journey to the place where we belong but have yet to experience. Our unwillingness in multitudinous ways to live in obedient love with the perfect Father, preferring our own self-centered willful and rebellious pursuits, has consequences. The collateral damage is great, sin abounds. And home has been lost.
Lent has sometimes become a little lost itself. It is seen as a time of “giving up” something valuable in your life, of being geared to an unhappy state, a time of no rejoicing or celebrating. The main theme of Lent is the pilgrimage home to the Garden, the risen life in Christ. As with any journey, it requires planning and preparation. Since the loss of home is directly related to the failure of mankind to live in a harmonious loving relationship with God, the pilgrimage back to the embrace of God begins with an inward journey of careful and objective reflection, self-examination to discover and root out the interior obstacles to both giving and receiving love. If done honestly, this exercise invariably leads to repentance. A focus on the tools of Lent in themselves, such as fasting, cessation of social events and giving up treasured things, can be the terminus of the journey, never reaching the Paschal goal. It often appears that Christians have arrived at a condition of perpetual Lent, forever dour, joyless and austere, negative about the planet created in love which we inhabit.
But the pilgrimage does not end in repentance, nor even in the “amendment of life,” which is its fruit. Repentance ends in forgiveness, absolution, if it is Christian repentance, directed at God. We are the Prodigal Son in Jesus’ parable (Luke 15:11-32), miserable, self-centered, insensitive, unloving, disobedient. The consequences find us soon enough, and the Prodigal sheds bitter tears of repentance.
But when he returns home, the forgiveness is instant and plenary. He has completed the pilgrimage and the celebration can begin. The goal of Lent is Easter joy. The process of Lent is through self-examination and repentance, using the tools of Lent. The story begins with the Prodigal’s departure into willful sin, much like Adam and Eve, not with repentance. Some get no further than that, and are lost in a distant land. Others are driven by the consequences to repent (it is worth noting that, at first, it was the Prodigal’s stomach which drove him, not his conscience).
The Elder Brother skips repentance and Lent, heading straight to self-righteous judgement of his brother, similar to the parable of the Pharisee and the Tax-Collector. He is also self-centered, insensitive, unloving and so disobedient that he will, in self pity and anger, forego the banquet rather than join his Father in welcoming back the Prodigal. For the Prodigal, his sin ultimately produced a learning curve through disaster and shame, followed by repentance, amendment of life and forgiveness, to finally encounter the embrace of unconditional love by the Father. For the Elder Brother, being a better and more loyal son has blinded him to his sins, as mentioned above. The story ends without telling us the Elder Brother’s journey from there. We can only hope for him that somehow he realizes that he is loveless, and that is a crucial human failure. “O Lord, who has taught us that all our doings are nothing worth without love...” begins the Collect Prayer which immediately precedes Lent (Collect for Quinquagesima). Without discovering that truth, the Elder Brother’s life will resemble that of many Christians, outwardly righteous, but loveless and angry, without joy or repentance, nor a way home.
“We forgo a profound opportunity when we view Lent as just another New Year’s Resolution, a time for self-optimization rather than spiritual nourishment” (Delaney Coyne, in “America” magazine). The opportunity is to do the pilgrimage, to make the Lenten journey through self, suffering and sin by means of examination, prayer and all means of spiritual locomotion to arrive finally at home, which has been lost but can be found again, into the loving embrace of the Father and the joy of the welcoming banquet of perpetual Easter.