My friend Pastor Daniel Meeter has a guest post about lent from Jessica Stockton, blogger of The Writtern Nerd, on his Old First Blog.
I was interested to read that she is blogging for the New York Times' new Local blog project for Fort Greene/ Clinton Hill.
So she's the literary blogger over there, which means, she'll be writing once every couple of weeks about the literary life of the neighborhood,
past and present.
.Here's an excerpt and a link from Old First Blog.
grow up observing it – it wasn't much emphasized in the California
Mennonite Brethren Church, and I think I learned about it from my
Catholic friends. It sounded a little weird to me, as it probably does
to most people.
It was actually a French cookbook that deepened
my understanding. Amid the decadent recipes for Easter cakes and meats,
the author mentioned that in traditional French and European culture,
Easter was following on a long cold season where no one had eaten meat,
eggs, or milk. This was a kind of medieval detox, she suggested, that
made the spring Easter feast all the more enjoyable.
I hadn't
thought before that about how seasonally appropriate Lent is, or was in
a culture more connected to the seasons. Food was scarcer as stores ran
out, so we tightened our belts. It's not doctrinal, but it's a wise
strategy of the church, to deal with of the most difficult time of year
and use it as a way of understanding sin and suffering.
Coming
from the mild weather of California, this part of the year in the
Northeast has always been especially difficult for me. It's been so
cold for so long, and it seems to be getting colder, and it seems
there's so much more winter still to come. I chafe against the weather,
frustrated and angry and indignant. Lent is a way of accepting the
darkness and the cold as right and appropriate for its time. I look
forward to Lent because it makes sense of the darkness.