“There is no movement without rhythm”

On a busy street near my home there is a single-level building containing two businesses that share a common wall. One is a donut shop. Next door is a weight loss clinic. Like the storefront shops, the days leading up to Lent, in particular, Mardi Gras joined at the hip to Ash Wednesday, offer an important spiritual insight. Mardi Gras, literally, Fat Tuesday, as all carnivores, revelers, rowdy rapscallions, Christians, and the All of the Aboves know, is the last celebratory blowout before the extended breathing in of Ash Wednesday which inaugurates the Season of Lent with its mood of prayerful communal and self-reflection. So the donut shop before the weight loss clinic. The feast giving way to the fast. It’s Oliver Hardy next to Stan Laurel. It’s the Allegro, then the Adagio, the song then the silence, the movement of the dance to the moment of stillness.

And it’s this last image I want to expand on a bit. There is a musical, rhythmic quality to life on earth seen perhaps most visibly in the transitions from one season to the next: autumn falls into winter, winter dies and is reborn in spring, spring jumps for joy into summer, summer shines bright and then comes to rest in fall. Fast, slow, movement, stillness, barren, blossom, sorrow, joy, break down, build up, weeping, laughing, mourning, dancing, death, rebirth – “To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under heaven.”[1]

Like the planet we live on, humans too know different seasons of life. Each season, accentuated by the one preceding and following it, invites a different way of moving, a new way of being. Like the seasons of nature, the liturgical seasons of Advent, Christmas, Lent, Easter, and Ordinary time[ii] with their intermittent feast and fast days, highlight certain existential realities and spiritual truths. The liturgical seasons remind us of the polyrhythmic nature of all reality. They invite us to live lives that are consciously and intentionally attuned to the particular tone, tenor, tempo, and truth of each season or feast day. In this way, after celebrating many cycles of the seasons and special days we learn the rhythm of each and listen with our entire being for what a given season, situation, event, relationship, or moment in life asks of us.

Elsewhere I have told the story of some young, scandalized nuns who discover St. Teresa of Avila indulging in a late night snack in the convent kitchen. She’s chowing down unapologetically on some leftover partridge. Sensing the novices peeping through the door into the kitchen, she accentuates her already enthusiastic devouring of the bird. Knowing it will get a rise out of the gobsmacked young sisters, she licks her fingers vigorously and smacks her lips loudly and then, without looking up from her plate, says to the peeping Tomasinas: “Sisters, when it’s time to pray, pray! When it’s time to partridge, partridge!”

Relatedly, St. Iranaeus said, “The glory of God is the human person fully alive.” But aliveness here does not refer to extroversion, boisterous enthusiasm, multi-tasking, frenetic activity, or checking off items on a bucket list. Rather, aliveness is manifested by attuning one’s life with the rhythm of a particular season, situation, event, relationship, or moment and offering a corresponding response. Sometimes attentive silence is called for. Sometimes wailing. Sometimes generosity is fitting. Other times daring to be different, to risk being oneself is the appropriate response. Sometimes courage is called for – the refusal to look away. Sometimes it’s the courage to let go and move more deeply into the meaning that lies behind the mystery. Sometimes it elicits partridging.

“Everything is rhythm,” says the tribesman, including us. And our task, especially during the season of Lent, is to align ourselves with the rhythm of God’s dream (called basileia tou Theou — the reign of God) so that we participate in its coming true “on earth as it is in heaven.” Participating in the coming of God’s dream, already here among us and not yet, is like living between late winter and early spring. Lent refers to the lengthening of light and the turn toward springtime. This image of the movement from winter to spring holds the spirituality of Lent just as the movement holds the rhythm. For there is no movement without rhythm.

Today we stand just this side of the threshold between one movement, with its particular emphasis and spirit, and another movement with its own unique rhythm. The rhythm of Lent calls us to slow down, be still, pay attention, listen deeply. It invites us to be reflective, take inventory of our lives, consider what matters most, practice the humble spaciousness of prayer, fasting, and giving to the needy, recommit ourselves to the human side of the Divine-Human inter-action, and to recreate ways to become Easter people who bring others life. It invites us to more consciously, intentionally, and regularly to re-member ourselves to the Holy One from whom we come, to our deepest most authentic self, to those who suffer the most in our world, and to the natural world that not only gives us life and sustenance but also speaks to us, evokes awe and wonder, and brings us joy.

The rhythm of Lent invites us to do some spring cleaning of the soul by marking four inner containers:
Worth Keeping,
Use Now,
Throw Away, and
Give Away.
It brings together the awareness of our own junk, giving it up, turning toward what truly enlivens, and tuning in to the One from whom all blessings flow. To the extent that Lent involves sacrifice (literally making sacred), ultimately it means giving up whatever there is within us or our daily lives that gets in the way of ourselves or others experiencing their own belovedness, the fullness of life, and/or the presence and love of God. The spectrum of this list goes from self-criticism and gossip to racism and desecrating the earth. The culturally unfashionable movements of repentance and remorse (for what I have done and what I have failed to do) move us, our families, our communities, our countries, and our planet toward restoration and liberation.

Lent summons us to make note of what behaviors we will choose to abstain from, eliminate, give more attention to, or consciously enact in order to:

look for where Christ is being crucified today
and take him down from the cross,
stimulate healing,
foster integrity,
cultivate wholeness,
find the vulnerable,
reach out to the lonely,
spread kindness,
become more compassionate,
bring life to others,
promote justice,
incarnate love, and
live lives compatible with being images of God.

Rhythm is “timed movement through space.” Our Jewish brothers and sisters insist on the commitment and practice of two essential movements: tikkun ha nephesh (repair of the soul) and tikkun ha olam (repair of the world). The rhythm and spirituality of Lent likewise encourages personal, social, and cosmic restorative practices. Only a spiritual life that consciously and intentionally works to heal the soul and mend the world is authentic, and for Christians, a true embodiment of the Christ-life.

♦ Click HERE for a video on what it looks and sounds like to be attuned to the Rhythm of Life.

♦ Click HERE for Judy Collins beautiful rendition of the well-known passage from Ecclesiastes.

[1] Ecclesiastes 3: 1

[ii] Ordinary Time does not signal the opposite of extraordinary times but rather the ordinal or sequential counting of days and weeks that give order to the time leading up to and following the major liturgical seasons of Advent/Christmas and Lent/Easter.