Lenten Spirituality: The Challenge to Love

Lenten Spirituality

Lent is a time when the church traditionally seeks, with humility, to center the heart on repentance, faith, and the soul’s readiness to draw near to God. Sadly, at times the season of Lent has also been used to try to display spiritual “superiority” through pious practices that, when misused, become excuses for feeding the ego. For that reason, we must explore what the Scriptures and Christian theology say about who we are as human beings in light of the reality proclaimed in Lent.

We are Dust, Yet Incredibly Loved

As a Pentecostal believer I found incredibly helpful and edifying the opportunity of sharing time with friends from other Christian traditions for example with Lutherans, Anglicans, Baptist, Presbyterians, and others. I was doing just that at the Ash Wednesday service at All Saints Honolulu, a beautiful Anglican community. Fr. Mark said something in his homily that caught my attention: “It is true—we are dust, but we are very beloved dust.” This expression alludes to passages from the Bible (see Gn. 3:19; Jn. 3:16). The first acknowledges human frailty, and the second affirms that God deeply loves that humanity. It is true that humanity was created from dust; it is also true that it is fragile. Yet it has been created by God, and He has for it a profound love that transcends our thoughts and surpasses our capacity to imagine love.

The season of Lent can be devoted to reflecting on our morality and repenting of our sins, but doing all of this within the profound and mysterious reality that the sovereign God loves us. The doctrine of the Incarnation help us understand—or at least begin to appreciate— this deep and mysterious reality, for the God who loves the human being created from the dust took humanness (dust) Himself in the person of Jesus Christ. In his birth through the blessed Virgin Mary, God entered our creaturely existence; in his embodied life, he shared the vulnerability of the human experience; in His death, he bore the full weight of our estrangement; and in His resurrection, He renewed and transfigured the very life he assumed. As theologian and bishop Chris E.W. Green says, “whatever he underwent, he changed for our sake.”^[1] God, in the person of Jesus Christ, took on humanness, and through this act transformed and transfigured our experience. By assuming our humanness, dust itself, and redeeming it from within, God reveals the depth of divine love and the transformation of our existence.

The Challenge of Lent: To Love

I propose in this portion of the article that the challenge of Lent is to love, and above all, to love in light of the life of Jesus Christ. Yet many Christians, naturally, name repentance as Lent’s central practice. In the lived Christian experience, repentance is often understood as the Spirit enabling work turning a person from sin toward God, a reorientation of desire expressed in sorrow, obedience, and transformed life.

Chirstian communities had articulated this point in various ways. In Christian traditions shaped by Wesleyan, Holiness, or Pentecostal/Charismatic spirituality, repentance is often framed through mourning over sin and embodied pious actions that reflects the contrition of the heart. In Reformed context, repentance is frequently described as the renewal of the mind by the Spirit and the ongoing work (progressive) of sanctification and mortification made visible or evident in a changed life. These approaches possess richness and Scriptural grounding. Yet, repentance may also be understood within the reality of loving God more than sin and therefore turning the heart toward God. This theological idea is present in the thought of the English Reformer and architect of the Book of Common Prayer, Thomas Cranmer. In Morning and Evening Prayer, the BCP says,

Almighty and most merciful Father,

we have erred and strayed from your ways like lost sheep.

We have followed too much the devices and desires of our own hearts.

We have offended against your holy laws.

We have left undone those things which we ought to have done,

and we have done those things which we ought not

to have done;

and apart from your grace, there is no health in us.

O Lord, have mercy upon us.

Spare all those who confess their faults.

Restore all those who are penitent, according to your promises

declared to all people in Christ Jesus our Lord. 

And grant, O most merciful Father, for his sake, that we may now

live a godly, righteous, and sober life, to the glory of your holy Name. 

Amen.^[2]

This beautiful prayer of confession is framed around the language of the “heart” and the “desires of the heart.” When our love and desires are distorted, we drift away from God, from ourselves, and from those around us. When God reorients our love, we can live in such a way that Jesus Christ is reflected in our own lives. A life whose love is reoriented and transfigured by the life of Jesus Christ can love God with all the heart, soul, and mind, and also love one’s neighbor as oneself (see Matt. 22:36-40). In a time when, as society, we have sinned by wanting to choose which “neighbor” to love, Scripture reminds us that the answer to this question is shaped by God’s mercy, just as Jesus responds to it with the story of the Good Samaritan: “Go and do likewise.”^[3]

Conclusion: The Restoration of Love

In Lent we celebrate a spirituality in which God’s love is restorative—not merely the abandonment of sin. We are dust, yet beloved dust; fragile yet rescued by a God who assumed weakness in the Incarnation; fallen, yet called to renewal through Jesus Christ. When, by God’s grace, love is reoriented and transfigured in accordance to the image of the Son, the human person begins to live in reconciliation with God, with self, with neighbor, and with the very earth which we were formed; the cosmos is immerse in the reconciling work of God.

Reconciliation takes the form of acts of hospitality, where love is practiced. Acts of hospitality are holy actions that reveal love for God and love for neighbor.^[4] To receive and to welcome, to share bread and space, to honor the embodied life that God has gifted reveal love for God and neighbor. Lent not only prepare us to remember the cross; it allows us an anticipatory participation in the new life God offers. This life is one in which we love God more than sin, and it becomes a visible sign of God’s grace at work within us. His work in us leads us to love the pilgrim, the immigrant, the homeless—in short, the neighbor, since we are all dust, yet indeed loved.