March Madness, and the Final Push

Three weeks of Lent remain, the last of which is the week we call “Holy Week. I feel that the sudden and the gradual converge. Lent which had seemed so long now seems to speed toward its climax. This Good Story that we face on the Fifth Sunday is yet another story of mercy and forgiveness, but this one would have a soundtrack in a minor key, its harmony with an undertone of gravity. In this Good Story, Death is cheated of its victim by love.

And meanwhile, March Madness, the national college basketball tournament, begins, with 64 teams playing each other to determine which one will survive as national champion. Having worked for my whole life at a struggling, nobly urban, marvelously idealistic little university, I looked at this national tournament as our opportunity to get some national attention, and perhaps have a better time attracting students. I thought of the season as three seasons, really, three chances to make the big time. One was the whole series of games before the tournament, all 35 games. If we did well in the whole season, we had a chance to get into the tournament. If we got off to a lousy start in the first ten or so games though, a second “season” was the twenty of so games against the teams in our own conference, with the possibility that we could do well there. Finally, there was the conference tournament, the local tournament with our own dozen or so teams, the winner of which would automatically get into the national tournament, even if we had had a losing season otherwise.
Consider these last three weeks as a second chance at a good Lent, a new season, an opportunity to really get into Holy Week on a roll. This Good Story of forgiveness, for defeating death, (Click for a link) is the last consoling story this Lent, the last deepest promise of hope. We have this opportunity to prepare ourselves for the toughest part of the journey to death, to build up enough momentum to carry us through it to the life on the other side.
In this new season, the same rules apply: Lent is a time of unwrinkling, returning to our whole-iest selves, by engaging our desire and our will within the sacredness of the Jesus story. We engage our will and desire by lacing on our two shoes of what might be called “prayer”: Entering the Good Stories and our nightly Examen. And we wear the ring of Fasting that reminds us that we have committed ourselves to this relationship with the wholeness within ourselves, the Holiness that is our name written on the heart of God. Finally, we consider an old word, almsgiving, which means seeing the poor around us and responding with compassion and generosity.  More about almsgiving tomorrow. Please join me in taking this opportunity to start again, even if your Lenten “season” has been lousy so far, so we can enjoy together the rich mystery of Holy Week, and the promise of Easter.

Lace up!

 FreeLemonadeStand by John J. Daniels is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.