Daily Reading for February 6 • Ash Wednesday
Lent is not a temporary affectation of gloom or a brisk interlude for self-improvement. It is for being in the wilderness, which means stopping long enough to recognize the truth of our inertia and faithlessness. This deadness inside is a fact. On Ash Wednesday we are called first to face this fact—but then what? What shall we do?
This may seem strange, but this year every time I have asked myself the question “What shall I do for Lent?” I have immediately thought of a brief exchange that occurs in a droll Russian novel by Goncharov. The hero, Oblomov, is asked what he does. The question astonishes and offends him. “What? What do I do? why, I am in love with Olga!” To him, the question about what he does is a question about his identity. He is a man in love, and that is who he understands himself to be.
The question that should be put to us all at the beginning of Lent is not “What shall we do?” The right question is the one to which the answer is, “Why, I am in love with God!” What begins to enliven our inertia is remembering and realizing that we are in love with God. True repentance, true change of heart, consists in grasping the fact that we are called to be in love with God, and that the love with which we love God is something already given to us. Repentance is coming alive to our given identity as lovers of God.
So, what shall we do for Lent? We shall act on our identity as women and men who are in love with God. We shall do whatever helps us remember and realize that identity and do what arises from it.
From “What Shall We Do For Lent?” in Nativities and Passions: Words for Transformation by Martin L. Smith (Cowley Publications, 1995).