Week of Ash Wednesday
Setting the Stage for Joy
Read: Psalm 52
For many, Lent is a time of pious reflection, somber confession, and prayerful introspection. Joy isn’t our first thought as we mark ashen crosses on our foreheads. In this way, though, Ash Wednesday teaches us something important about joy: there are plenty of days when joy feels like it is a long way away.
While joy is something that can be felt as happiness, it is not only a happy feeling. If happiness is an alleluia shouted from the heart, then joy is the beating of the heart itself. It’s a vibration within us that resonates with the beat of the divine. Joy persists through happy times and bleak ones, through alleluias and ashes. It connects us to divine joy even when we don’t feel happy by pointing through and beyond our pain toward a sacred reality shaped by God’s will for creation.
These Lenten devotions will seek joy in many forms over the course of the whole season. This will be a Lent filled with joy, bursting with joy… but you don’t have to feel ready for joy. Not yet, or even at all. Anyone who tells you differently misses what the psalms and the prophets demonstrate over and over: new life can and will come only from God, but some days, the only reality we know is that we’re dying. Don’t rush into joy this Lent. Instead, trust the sequence of joy we find in scripture. At times we don’t feel joy, but the fallow season will not last forever.
Take this time at the start of the season to recall the many moments in your life when joy has felt absent, distant, incomplete, dangerous, or entirely impossible. Let yourself acknowledge these moments, even if they feel scary. Try it as an act of faith, trusting that joy hasn’t disappeared forever. The God of resurrection always restores the joy of salvation in the end.
Ash Wednesday, February 14
Yet even now, says the Lord, return to me with all your heart, with fasting, with weeping, and with mourning.…
Joel 2:12
Pray: lament
If you experience water damage on a wall or ceiling, you can’t simply paint over it. Water stains will bleed through paint, leaving you with an old stain on a freshly painted wall. When our cheeks are stained from tears, we can dry off our faces and pretend that nothing is wrong, but when deep trauma or loss damage our lives, we can’t slap on a fresh coat of joy and just move on. Instead, as the prophet Joel suggests, if we want to feel deep joy, we first have to recognize the depth of our weeping and mourning, too. Christian tradition makes room for this type of recognition with prayers, psalms, and hymns of lament.
Where is the “water damage” in your life? What losses have left their mark on you? What particular areas of your life are yearning to feel joy? As you pray your lament, use a journal, note-taking app, or scrap of paper to write what you are praying. At the end of Lent, you’ll return to what you record today to consider how God responds to your prayer.