Lenten Devotional
Last year I ceremoniously gave up buying books for Lent. The year before I think I gave up dairy for the 40 day stretch.It was tough, but it had it’s rewards.
I have been known to quiz my beloveds on what they might be doing for Lent. I had quite the rant on the value of giving something up for Lent as being very noble. I even posted my commitment under my church’s Devotional Banner which we hide in plain sight on our web page.
Here is the link: https://mccdc.com/wp-content/uploads/Lent-2020-What-Are-You-Doing-for-Lent-Jackie-L-final-.pdf if you would like some ideas.
I’ll admit that when I realized that Lent was barely days away with an official start date being ASH WEDNESDAY, March 2nd in 2022; I cued up the lectionary for the reading of assigned scripture https://lectionary.library.vanderbilt.edu/texts.php?id=117 ; but I had yet to determine my personal spiritual practice for the Lenten season.
There is my usual tendency to start a bit of a buying frenzy. I can stockpile and indulge more stuff to allay my fear I may totally lose it before Easter and go in to withdrawal or worst the failure to adapt to my stated change in behavior.
Books especially were very tricky. I could hide them as eBooks to my kindle reader, ply gifts to friends, and grandkids, and regifting books that I had read in the assurance they needed a new home. Quite frankly, I had already made a commitment to resume my abstention of book buying for Lent. But this year, I wanted to see if there was something else, I might commit to that would be heightened by devotion.
I pretty much have modified the dairy to allowing for no straight cow’s milk. Monitoring my consumption is really quite simple as the consequences are swift and unforgiving. In fact, I don’t miss the gas or discomfort at all! This is now easy…. My child mind says I must pick something harder to master.
In addition to not buying books for the 40 days of Lent, might I look at the exchange of books differently as a shift in sharing literacy, writing, listening to other voices and providing information? How do I share my thoughts about the Bible and other text?
Rather than “buying” books, or even “giving” books away to folks who did not wish to read them or worst who did not even ask for them; could I be about the business of selling books, as a way to expose a new audience to innovative or old ideas. What if putting books and information in the hands of those willing to subscribe to; to purchase; or to read something that they wanted but didn’t know it ever existed. Somebody famous said: I write what I want to read”
My daughter loves to tell me that the term “Gay Christians” is oxymoronic, no one reads books, everyone tweets, and you lose your audience if there is no audio file or you tube matching. Our “on demand” culture has evolved that way for a reason. Lesbian Feminist followers of the Christ may even be a more rare breed.
Last year at the close of the Advent season, in time for the Winter Solstice, I “curated” a book that brought together voices from my beloved community about their vision and perspective on who God is and how they could relate if at all.
When I was in high school circa 1970, I had an internship at the Studio Museum in Harlem. https://www.studiomuseum.org It was an introduction to art history, contemporary museum curation and the notion of an internship to creating a career in a museum and what I know now to be a seminal part of the black arts movement. I fell in love with the artist. You don’t know that what you do daily becomes history. Your voice is oral history and provides a unique perspective: Yours. Your voice is art! How do we share what we want to truly know about each other?
I hadn’t thought at all about how I would promote the book or get it in the hands to those who might want to read it and take the dive. Wasn’t it enough to just write the words down, just read them for myself? Would it really be OK to sell the books lining up on my dining room table?
And then earlier today, as if by magic, I read an email missive I get routinely from Hyperallergic.
They have been experimenting with a new way to curate “art” & “voices” from the perspective of the curator who must use the medium of email.
Fourth in a series of email shows, Dan Cameron described his process. I so loved what he said, and I saw the immediate connection in preparing for my own Lenten journey this season.
“I’ve always believed that an important part of a curator’s function is to test out unexplored possibilities for locating, nurturing, and presenting art. Not only do the most time-tested modes of exhibition-making deserve to be regularly turned on their heads and shaken vigorously, but exploring the outer limits of what constitutes contemporary art, or art in the broader sense, is a duty that none of us should be trying to shirk. This is especially important the further one drifts from their personal geo-cultural comfort zone, where long-held beliefs about how art is made, and how it exists in society, eventually need to be revisited and possibly even revamped.”
From Dan Cameron, Curator
New ways of going to galleries and museums, new ways of doing church, new ways of practicing Lent. New ways of sharing our work and our books. Suddenly everything fell into place.
