Second Sunday in Lent

O shut me round with narrowing nunnery-walls,
Meek maidens, from the voices crying ’shame.’
I must not scorn myself: he loves me still.
Let no one dream but that he loves me still.
So let me, if you do not shudder at me,
Nor shun to call me sister, dwell with you;
Wear black and white, and be a nun like you,
Fast with your fasts, not feasting with your feasts;
Grieve with your griefs, not grieving at your joys,
But not rejoicing;

- From Tennyson’s “Guinevere”

In Tennyson’s Idylls of the King, Guinevere functions as his everyman, the representative of ordinary humanity. Her betrayal of Arthur and her reconciliation with him speaks not only of the nature of adultery, but of sin and the universal human condition.

After her affair with Lancelot is discovered and she has fled Camelot, Arthur finds her in the convent where she is hiding. For the first time she faces the significance of her actions, and Guinevere recognizes that her sin - and symbolically, all sin - is ultimately a failure of hope, a rejection of the greater things God has for us. God places joy in our hands, and sin consists of carelessly letting it drop, reaching for something else. In her famous words:

Ah my God,
What might I not have made of thy fair world,
Had I but loved thy highest creature here?
It was my duty to have loved the highest:
It surely was my profit had I known:
It would have been my pleasure had I seen.

We do not look up high enough; we do not aspire. I have always found uncomfortably true the confession from the late musician Rich Mullins: “I’d rather fight you for something I don’t really want/ than take what you give that I need.”

Repentance and forgiveness offer to us a restoration of vision and hope (though rarely a return of passed-by opportunities).

The quote with which I began this post is Guinevere’s closing penitential speech to the nuns with whom she will live. Despite the insight Tennyson offers in the rest of his poem, here I think he missed the mark. Tennyson tries to show us the sincerity of Guinevere’s repentance by promising that she will never participate in joy again. While she hopes in heaven, she still will never let herself feel anything but penitence.

Today is the second Sunday in Lent. Lent is a period of traditional fasting and self-denial in preparation for the events of Holy Week, when we remember the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Lent is the forty days before Easter - except it isn’t. The season of Lent is forty days plus six Sundays.

Sunday, in Christian liturgical tradition, is always a feast day. Christians took the seven day week from ancient Hebrew tradition and worship, and transformed the Sabbath into Sunday in honor of the day on which Jesus rose from the dead. Every Sunday, even during Lent, we rejoice and celebrate the resurrection of Jesus. Even in the midst of fasting, we remember the resurrection and we feast.

This is where the Guinevere poem is so dissatisfying. Guinevere does not need to abstain from all joy forever. Our goal, even in Lent when we formally meditate upon our sins, is not to be in constant self-recrimination. Every Sunday the resurrection breaks through and lets us know that God is bigger than sin, even bigger than death. Every Sunday we receive the fresh assurance of the possibility of new life, freeing us from the old. Every Sunday, God’s forgiveness shakes the ground and rolls the stone away again.

Refusing to ever feel joy is a kind of denial of this constant and resurging grace. It is ultimately the opposite of humility. Humbly receiving the joy and love God offers, rather than insisting it could not really be for screw-ups like us, is the mark of real repentance. To do otherwise is to once again let the joy slip from our hands.

“For His anger is but for a moment; His favour is for a lifetime. Weeping may tarry for the night, but joy comes in the morning.” Psalm 30:5

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I meant to write this post last week for the first Sunday in Lent, but I was too worn out. I will try to write a post each Sunday until Easter on the themes of fasting and feasting, but sometime during Lent I may have a baby, which will surely mean a blog hiatus (or maybe I should say a blog fast).

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