Thoughts at the beginning of Lent

Why does God invite us to go into our room and shut the door?

There’s an old Peanuts comic strip in which Linus approaches Charlie Brown and asks, “Charlie Brown, do you want to know what the trouble is with you?” 

Charlie Brown looks at Linus and answers simply. “No.” 

The two stare at each other….  Then Linus says, “The trouble with you, Charlie Brown, is that you don’t want to know what the trouble is with you.”

I guess there’s some truth in that about each of us.  Sometimes we’re too full of pride or denial to want to know what the trouble is with us.  That’s true some of the time.  But my experience is that most of the people who come to talk with me are all too aware of what troubles them, what they believe is wrong in them.  

Psalm 51 puts it well: “I know my transgressions, and my sin is ever before me.”  The bigger problem for many of us is not that we are in denial, but that we are too acutely aware of what is wrong with us.  And the result is that we seek out nonjudgmental clergy and therapists to help us, because our lives have become centered on, and defined by, what we believe is wrong.  We want to see more.

And unfortunately, in our present cultural moment, many of us are often like Linus – we are all too ready to point out what is wrong with someone else.  But when our attention is centered on what is wrong, either in ourselves or in others, this just means that the pearl of great price will go unnoticed, the buried treasure will remain buried, in our own lives and in the lives of others.

Psalm 51 concludes, “The sacrifice of God is a troubled spirit, a broken and contrite heart, O God, you will not despise.”  My sense is that most of us are troubled enough, already.  And God isn’t inviting us to go into our room and shut the door so that God can remind us how we have fallen short.

Instead, perhaps God wants us to pray in secret, so that God can approach us in a most unexpected way, and so that God can reward us with something we might never see, if we continue to center our lives on what is wrong.  Being troubled and broken-hearted is enough.  Maybe the Gospel is an invitation to something more. 

Maybe Lent is the time to go into our room and shut the door, not so that God can remind us of our sins, which are already “ever before us,” but so that God can approach with the pearl of great price, the treasure that has been buried for too long, and God can ask us, “Do you want to know what I love about you?” 

And then we can open our door, leave our room, and approach each other in this same way.