I was struck by another vehicle today as I was parking my car in San Francisco. Although nobody was hurt, it was a frightening and costly experience, the latter in both financial and relational terms. I had been on my way to visit the hospital where my father at that very moment in surgery, and after the impact I spent six impatient hours waiting for a tow truck that never came. Dad’s surgery went well and eventually I coaxed the vehicle home, all the while pondering how I would navigate the next two days of his hospitalization on an unfamiliar public transit system. It became a sacred journey; more on that later.
That was my crash, but I can’t help but notice that the Tuesday before Ash Wednesday—sometimes called Fat Tuesday or Shrove Tuesday or Carnival—is a day of collision. Between the values of limitless production and consumption and seductive illusion of control that accompany them, and the ancient spiritual discipline of letting go that is at the heart of Lent. When the excess is consumed—the sugar and sausages, the oil in which pancakes are fried, even the fuel burning cars that calibrate our urban rhythms—we are freed to live a slower, humbler and less resource-intensive life. And thereby catch a glimpse of the radical letting-go that the early church saw in Jesus and sang about in Philippians 2:1-13.
Being hit by another vehicle wasn’t the Fat Tuesday clash of cultures I would have chosen. It actually messed up my planned piety as I had been hoping to make it to some Episcopal church’s pancakes supper after the hospital visit. Which I could only have done with a car and its deceptive promise of speed and autonomy. But despite our best laid plans, Lent comes to us anyway: perhaps the best we can really do is be open to its countercultural impact. So I’m claiming this as my season of letting go for Lent. Let’s see where #LentINGo takes me.
