Barbara Brown Taylor on Lent:

I know people who give up using their cell phones for Lent.  Can you imagine?  I know other people who give up watching television or shopping or eating while they are standing up.  Of course, none of these things would impress people who have spent their whole lives trying to figure out where the next meal is coming from, but in a culture of plenty I am impressed with anyone who decides to make it without anesthesia for a while–to give up whatever appliances or habits or substances they use to keep themselves from feeling what it really feels like to live the kind of lives they are living. 

I mean, almost everyone uses something–if not anesthesia, then at least a favorite pacifier: murder mysteries, Facebook, reruns of Boston Legal, Pottery Barn catalogs, Bombay Sapphire gin martinis.  I’m not saying those are awful things.  I’m just saying they are distractions–things to reach for when a person is too tired, too sad, or too afraid to enter the wilderness of the present moment–to wonder what it’s really about or who else is in it or maybe just to make a little bed in the sand.

The problem for most of us is that we cannot go straight from setting down the cell phone to hearing the still, small voice of God in the wilderness.  If it worked like that, churches would be full and Verizon would be out of business.  If it worked like that, Lent would only be about twenty minutes long. 

What we have instead are forty whole days for finding out what life is like without the usual painkillers, which is how most of us learn what led us to use them in the first place.  Once you take the headphones off, silence can be really loud.  Once you turn off the television, a night can get really long.  After a while you can start thinking that all of this quiet emptiness or, worst case, all this howling wilderness, is a sign of things gone badly wrong: devil on the loose, huge temptations, no help from the audience, God gone AWOL–not to mention your own spiritual insufficiency to deal with any of these things. 

But if you remember to breathe–and say your prayers–then nine times out of ten you can make it through your first night with no extra bread, power, or protection.  You can get used to the sound of your own heart beating and whatever it is that is yipping out there.  You may even be able to sleep a little while and wake up gladder to be alive than you can ever remember being.  So there are thirty-nine days to go.  So don’t count.  Take it one day at a time.

After you have reached for your pacifier a few times and remembered it is not there–not because someone stole it from you but because you made a conscious decision to give it up–then you may discover a whole new level of conversation with yourself.

Are you hungry?
I am famished . 

Well, what’s wrong with that?  Are you dying?
No.

Can you stand being hungry for a while longer?
Maybe.  I guess so.

Okay, so what else?  Are you lonely?
Yes, I am!  I am terribly lonely!

What’s wrong with being alone?  Will it kill you?
I don’t like it.

That’s not what I asked.  Can you live through it?
Probably not, but I’ll try.

Our minds are geniuses at telling us that losing our pacifiers is going to kill us, but it’s almost never true.  All that’s going to happen is that we’re going to suck air for a while, then we’re going to hiccup, then we’re going to look around and see things without that pink plastic circle under our noses, which is going to turn out to be a good thing both for us and for everyone else in our lives. 

But it would be a mistake for me to try to describe your wilderness exam.  Only you can do that, because only you know what devils have your number, and what kinds of bribes they use to get you to pick up.  All I know for sure is that a voluntary trip to the desert this Lent is a great way to practice getting free of those devils for life–not only because it is where you lose your appetite for things that cannot save you, but also because it is where you learn to trust the Spirit that led you there to lead you out again, ready to worship the Lord your God and serve no other all the days of your life.  Amen.

The Wilderness Exam | Day 1