Thanks to Jess over here http://churchyear.blogspot.com (you might have to copy and paste, since wordpress appears to hate me and won’t let me link) , I’ve been thinking a lot about lent. Which has been good for me, as it allows me to remember some of my trends for Lent, such as making really really long lists of things I want to give up or take on and then feeling disappointed when, two weeks later, I can’t remember any of them. Okay, perhaps that’s not exactly true, but enough of it is that I want to be aware of it this year.

I really want to look at death this Lent. Or perhaps look past it is more what I mean. I don’t want to fixate on it and be morbid, but it’s in my thoughts enough right now to really want to focus my thinking in the right direction. Lately I’ve noticed that not very many of us think about death and when we do, it’s because we’re startled into it. A celebrity dies or a family member is in a car accident or a child gets sick and mortality is thrown in our face. We’re shocked and horrified and grieved and then it all settles back down and we go with our lives because honestly, it’s hard to keep death in front of us. We can only bear so much.

But we’re dying. You are. I am. The grandma up the street in the nursing home and the child playing on the swings are both going to die unless Jesus comes back first. All of us people, created in the image of God, created for life, are walking around this fallen planet with an incurable terminal disease. And whether we live to be seven or ninety-seven or somewhere in between, we’re going to die.

I want to learn how to live so that dying isn’t such a nasty shock. I mean, it always will be because we weren’t originally meant for it, but it seems like there’s a way to live and love people well so that dying is more about an interruption and less about guilt and regret and inconsolable grief. I want to learn more about how to love the people around me, not just the ones who I know are dying right now. Sometimes I wonder if how we lived would change if we all walked around wearing t-shirts that read I’m Dying on the front. Would that reminder help us to love better? Or would it just serve as a sort of The World Ends Tomorrow poster, that throws everyone into a panic and convinces them to run around trying to cram all sorts of well-meaning things into a 24 hour span? Tied up in all of this is how I see death and how I see people and how I see other people’s life and death affecting me. With those thoughts in mind, one of my lenten activities is meditating on John Donne’s Meditation XVII (perhaps known better as the “ask not for whom this bell tolls, it tolls for thee” meditation) and Lewis’ essay The Weight of Glory. I don’t know where that will take me, honestly, but I figure that as I follow Christ this year, through the wilderness, the silence, the betrayal, the murder, and into the light of resurrection morning, where better to grapple with all of this than at the foot of the cross and the opening of the empty tomb?