Lenten Ash

Hello, Dust, it’s me, Dust.

Today begins Lent, a time of divine reflection and self-denial. Ascetism is so hot right now.

This year will feature a social media fast. Chesterton beat the circumference of no shrub when he wrote, “I have found only one religion that dares to go down with me into the depth of myself.” That’s the idea. I’ve been tracking what most often interrupts my morning devotions and desire to think outside of myself, and rotating through social media is by far the greatest culprit. And I reckon there are two reasons for that. One, it satisfies my pride to be the micro-celebrity that Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn allow me to think I am. Second, they each permit me to lie to myself about a time obligation — they suggest, each in their own subtly different way, that only another 15 seconds of my attention are needed for any one thing . . . but then I’ve been sitting there for 45 minutes having accomplished less than nothing. Writing a post or finishing Voyage of the Dawn Treader is 40 minutes, but an Instagram reel is 20 seconds — the latter couldn’t really interrupt the former, right?

I’ve surrendered sugar or alcohol in the past, but having already given up alcohol long-term and having an underdeveloped sweet tooth, neither is an Abel-level sacrifice — Cain-quality vegetation at best. So, this year, eschewing the platforms that digitally deify me is the pick, and then I plan to follow my dad’s example and fast from Good Friday to Easter morning.

My prayer, as we enter these 40 days of deference, is to see what Gerard Manley Hopkins, the Victorian poet, observed in his inspired “God’s Grandeur”:

The world is charged with the grandeur of God.

    It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;

    It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil

Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?

Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;

    And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;

    And wears man’s smudge and shares man’s smell: the soil

Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.

And for all this, nature is never spent;

    There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;

And though the last lights off the black West went

    Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs —

Because the Holy Ghost over the bent

    World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.

May your Lent be a blessing for your faith as we anticipate the celebration of Christ’s triumphal sacrifice.