An Accidental Lent

Flaubert has just shown us Emma at the piano with Charles watching her. He says, "She struck the notes with aplomb and ran from top to bottom of the keyboard without a break. Thus shaken up, the old instrument, whose strings buzzed, could be heard at the other end of the village when the window was open, and often the bailiff's clerk, passing along the highroad, bareheaded and in list slippers, stopped to listen, his sheet of paper in his hand."

The more you look at a sentence like that, the more you can learn from it... It's always necessary to remember that the fiction writer is much less immediately concerned with grand ideas and bristling emotions than he is with putting list slippers on clerks.

- Flannery O'Connor in Mystery and Manners

On my bookshelf sits a fine paddleball game, painted in bright colors and the words "Rainbows from Heaven". It was a gift from the leaders of a young adults retreat called Vocare that Ardelle and I spoke to a few months ago.

I keep the thing around because I don't know what it's for.

Paddleball sort of has a purpose, I guess: trying to make contact with the bouncy little ball that's been affixed to the paddle by a length of rubber band. But the decoration of the paddle with a grinning sun, three colored rainbow, and requisite dove makes the thing harder to make sense of. Reconciling the campy happiness of its message with the violent, percussive nature of the game is a little odd. So I don't bother. I just do it.

Lent is often a purposeful time. We deny ourselves chocolate, hoping we'll lose weight, or coffee, hoping our jittery hands will calm. Or we take up something like serving at a soup kitchen or reading the Bible, hoping we'll become more compassionate, or more faithful, or more something.

But it also might be helpful to be unsure of what Lent is for. Flannery O'Connor believed that the worst writing has long been produced by writers who think they know what they're doing, especially writers who have a moral or an agenda they'd like to embed in a story. As she puts it, the worst writers are more concerned with "grand ideas and bristling emotions" than they are with "putting list slippers on clerks".

The plot of Madam Bovary didn't hang on the sort of slippers worn by that clerk. But the story is enduring only because Flaubert created a believable world, and cared as much about its unnecessary particulars as he did about any lesson or theme to which his novel might be reduced.

Similarly, I'm deciding not to decide about the purpose or outcome of Lent this year. Without pretending to know what they're for, I'm going to relish Lent's spare details, the litany, the noonday prayers, my coffeeless mornings and Tuesday blogs... I'm going to relish these details without asking them to mean or do anything too soon.

Leaving them a little bit free, perhaps, to mean or do things that I can't quite imagine.

Paddleball anyone?