I am a low-church kind of gal. I was “saved” in a sweaty tent service in an Assemblies of God church camp in rural Michigan, far from the trappings of my aristocratic expat upbringing in Europe; my heart thumping, my palms sweating and my soul saying a loud, rattling-with-Holy Spirit-tongues-filled YES to the preacher who called us to surrender our lives to Jesus at the front.

I had never even heard of Lent.

Lent? As in that time I lent my friend my LipSmacker’s root beer chapstick and never got it back?

As I grew up and more exposed to the shadow sides in myself, my family, the world writ large, Lauren Winner became my pipeline to more ancient practices through her Mudhouse Sabbath dive into Jewish ritual. I needed something that didn’t require I muster emotional strength; a trellis, some scaffolding for the spiritual life. And somehow from there, alongside my “post-evangelical” church planting friends we all reached for Shane Claiborne and Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove’s Common Prayer: A Liturgy for Ordinary Radicals, an anthology for up and coming earnest white folks trying to live the Way of Jesus. And somehow that led me to Advent, which my melancholic soul loved in all its angsty yearning as the days grew darker towards Christmas morning (“the hopes and fears of all the years are met in Thee tonight”). The spring always hurled by with our trips down to Florida, carting 18-22 year olds in tour buses to encounter Jesus in the context of justice work, and I never could quite get Lent to stick.

But now I have a relatively uninterrupted stretch of Spring before me within which to explore this mysterious Lenten season that beckons me real close to listen well. I’m curious about Lent through the eyes of birth. I want to scour the Scriptures as we move through the familiar themes: Wildnerness, Expectation, Cleansing, and all of Holy Week leading up the great Pascal mystery of Birth-Death-Resurrection. This low-church girl is wading deeper into these Orthodox roots, exploring anew what the early church Mothers might want to say to us, and what God might want to teach us as we live in our bodies and in the shapes of our lives these 40 days.

Oh, isn’t that poetic, too?

40 days.

40 weeks.

Lenten Pregnancy, Easter Birth.

The buds are beginning to emerge on frozen limbs, the unseen work of new life pokes through.

“If Advent/Christmas is a revelation of God’s presence with us, then Lent/Easter is a revelation of God’s desire to use all of life for our wholeness and our healing— the revelation that he will pull life from death.” + Greg Pennoyer in the Preface to God For Us

Wow. I want to receive all of life for my wholeness and healing. Better yet, for our wholeness and healing.

Let’s listen together.

Tell me, have you engaged with Lent before?

And also, is there something God is birthing through you?