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The era of invincibility is over. It was an illusion all along

In the liturgical calendar, we are entering the fourth week of Lent. The Lenten season is the six weeks leading up until Easter. It begins on Ash Wednesday with a service where a priest spreads ashes on your forehead, saying the words, “You are dust, and to dust you shall return.”

Thus commences a season of repentance and forgoing. The flowers at the front of the church are taken down. The altar and everything around it is bare. Many churchgoers fast during the week, giving up wine or sweets or bread to remind themselves that these things are gifts and to spend more focused time on Scripture and in prayer. This paring-down brings clarity, gratefulness, a deeper sense of understanding about what is truly important, not just mentally but through re-enforcing physical surroundings.

Lent ends with the biggest party of the Christian year: Easter. Christ succumbs to death on Good Friday — from dust, to dust — and then defies it with the Resurrection on Easter Sunday. Cascades of lilies and sweet smells fill the church. Easter feasts gather family and friends around a table with an abundance of good things. And somehow it is all sweeter, more special, because of the weeks of austerity that preceded it.

The grace of the church calendar is threefold. First, that it’s up to you to participate or not. No one is forcing you to do it. There’s freedom in the restriction being self-imposed. Second, that you know exactly when it ends; it’s not an additional day nor one day less. This gives peace to settle into the season and the forgoing, knowing when it will end. And third, that you know exactly how it ends. That it doesn’t just peter out from exhaustion, but that it ends with a celebration of victory.

This Lenten season adds a new dimension, COVID-19, devoid of such graces. The global pandemic, still in its early weeks in America, has tanked markets, closed schools, temporarily cleared grocery store shelves and, poignantly during this season, shuttered places of worship. The people who know the most about the new coronavirus will tell you that we know little about it, as tends to be the case with so many things. The professional advice is to stay local, stay home if you can, and support those in need. Something we should all do.

Life’s extras — eating out, shopping, parties and gatherings — have evaporated nearly overnight. We are going to miss those. We are going to realize that much of the time we took those things for granted. We might begin thinking about how thankful we’ve been for having them, and how thankful we are for the things that remain: our kids, our friends, our faith, our pets, the beginning of spring and warm weather, the lighter nights.

The things that before filled our time — looking at Instagram, endlessly keeping up with the Joneses, the partisan banter, the family drama — already are being seen with more clarity. Suddenly the ripped jeans trend, the relationship strains, the bothersome colleague, have begun a rapid descent from something to spend time and energy on to something that can be seen for what it is: of lesser importance than the important things we tend to think about rarely, if at all.

I was walking around the block this week with my family. A neighbor out with his dog stopped to talk. We started talking about the meaning of life. He will be 80 this summer. I think we are going to start having a lot more conversations about these types of things.

Our era of invincibility is taking an unexpected turn. In the developing world, one gets used to significant life disruptions from illness, violence and the like. We are less used to life’s adaptations here. In a recent book, Ross Douthat declared us to be a “decadent society.” That rings true. Which is why it feels so deeply unsettling — like something is being taken away that we had forgotten we even had. We are being reminded that we are much less in control than we would like to think and than our modern technologies would lead us to believe.

We enter Lent more deeply this year. Some religious leaders have suggested that the coronavirus might be from God. I am no priest, but I believe this is a dangerous road. Bad things happen around us all the time: cancer, suicide, broken families, tornadoes, war, senseless violence. The world is fallen. Disaster randomly and chaotically strikes like a snow globe being shaken, and us within. The promise of the Gospel is that God gives us power, peace, love and wisdom in the midst of the chaos, in the midst of our difficulties. To our chaos, God gives order and meaning and purpose and power.

The church calendar is a beautiful display of this, with its rhythms of sacrifice and celebration all predictable and timebound, providing sense when things around us are senseless.

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