The one time I gave up church for Lent (with footnotes)

Today (Ash Wednesday) marks one year since I gave up church for Lent. Giving up church for Lent sounds very dramatic, or maybe melodramatic, depending on how generous you’re feeling towards one of those immature, narcissistic Millenials who leave church, even temporarily.

Lent, to me, isn’t so much a time for giving up something bad so much as a time for giving up something that’s not helpful right now to make space for something better, to ask where life is out of sync with where it ought to be, and then try to reset it. After watching my friend practice Lent like this over the first few years of our friendship, I had begun to feel that this was something I should do, too. But I didn’t grow up in a tradition that observe Lent formally, and the church I had been part of for the past ~10 years was opposed to anything resembling a liturgical calendar, so most years Lent came and I briefly panicked about maybe doing something, and then gave up on the idea.

Last year, though, I was growing increasingly depressed with my relationship with my church, which had been complex for years. Something I had always admired about their tradition—the gorgeously coherent metanarrative called a “worldview”—was becoming a serious problem for me, a postmodern academic with a deep and abiding suspicion of metanarratives.* At the time I don't think I would have pinned the problem on that—I would have said it was their views on gender, or God's justice, or inerrancy, or the definition of a Christian, or any number of other things—but most of these issues stem from this urge to force everything to fit into a set of predetermined categories.

Once upon a time, the idea that all the bewildering complexity of Life, the Universe, and Everything could be addressed within a single, comparatively simple system was deeply appealing.** I enjoy making lists and sorting stuff. In high school I shelved my books according to genre, author, and sometimes even publisher. But then there was that one book of essays that I couldn’t make fit into any category, so I shoved it on the end of one shelf and hoped no one noticed. No one did, of course, because not only did no one but me care about my bookshelves, hardly anyone could get in my room anyway. In spite of (or because of) my best efforts at organizing, my room was always a disaster. The level of systemization I tried to force onto my life couldn’t make my room make sense.  It also didn’t work on my locker, my backpack, or my binders full of notes when I was in graduate school (it’s a wonder my dissertation ever happened). What often happened was that I would give up and just leave things on the floor rather than trying to figure out where they should go.

There are lots of people for whom their systems do work. They are not me.

When I was 18 and first attending a church in this tradition, I figured the points at which the narrative didn’t jive with observed reality were just because I wasn’t wise enough, or knowledgeable enough about Greek, or Hebrew, or whatever. Surely it would make more sense as I got older and learned more. But the more I learned, the worse it got. By the time I was in graduate school, it wasn’t just my life that didn’t fit with the metanarrative—it was all these other lives (both real life and textual) that didn’t fit either, and they all didn’t fit in different ways.***

You can probably use me as a case study on why you shouldn’t sent your kids off to get advanced degrees at state schools.

Over the years, the points of intersection between my life and the metanarrative crumbled. For example, the only way I could be happily married was to jettison the how-to-be-married part of the narrative altogether, followed by a good chunk of the parenting part when Margaret, Destroyer-of-Paradigms, was born.**** The summer that Blaise was born, the connection between the metanarrative and the world as I experienced shattered completely. I floundered along for a few more months, but finally one Sunday David and I realized we shouldn’t go back to that church.

Then I discovered that Lent began that week, and it seemed like a good time to formally give up the system, in favor of….? I knew I was giving up the thing that wasn’t good for me right now, but I wasn’t very hopeful about what I could possibly be making space for.

*not that I’m the only person who has ever had this problem, or that only academics are suspicious of metanarratives and worldviews, just that this was how I experienced it.

**physicists like making things fit, too, and have had just as much luck as me, which is to say, not much, thanks to the discovery of a large family of time-traveling teleporting telekinetic subatomic particles.

***and let’s not even start talking about all the different ways that that single anthology of texts, the Bible, can be and has been read over the millenia.

****which may have been part of why Margaret was usually the loudest kid in church when we still went there, but I have no regrets in this regard except perhaps for keeping her there long after we had realized that this was not the place for us.