If I Were a Real UU...

A homily for Lent.

Delivered, Ash Wednesday, 2010
Valley Vespers, Unitarian Universalist Church of the Verdugo Hills

Christmas Day. Thanksgiving. Fourth of July. I don’t know if Ash Wednesday is anybody’s favorite holiday.

There's no bunnies painting colored eggs. There's no groundhog looking for his shadow. There’s no Ash Wednesday equivalent of Santa Claus; that’s for sure. Perhaps the Lenten Santa Claus would come down your chimney and then deliberately track fireplace ashes across your living room carpet in the shape of a cross.

There is no Lenten wreath on the door or Lenten lights on the roof. I don’t think they sell strings of grey holiday lights. There are no presents. There’s no special food. In fact, you’re supposed to give up special foods. It’s the holiday where it’s better to give up than recieve. It’s the anti-holiday: the holiday where you can re-use the Christmas cards you got two months ago by crossing out the word “Joy” and sending them back to your friends marked postage due.

Mardi Gras gives us parades and dancing and drinking. Then, against the drunken fun of Fat Tuesday, Lent stretches out like a 40-day hangover. Except, instead of guilt for one night’s drinking we’re get guilt for all our sins. Instead of a headache that merely feels like death, we supposed to spend 40 days contemplating actual death. Instead of a half-hearted oath to never drink again, that’s forgotten by Saturday, we’re supposed to give up some joy that makes life fun from now all the way until Easter.

Lent’s no party. Spiritually Lent can seem like a worthless downer. Why bother? Unitarian Universalists focus on the gifts of the spiritual life: the abundance, not the privations; the ecstatic, not the miserable. Our faith encourages us to enumerate our capabilities and inherent worth and dignity, not our sins and failures.

But there is something important to Lent. Though not my favorite holiday, I have come over the last few years, to respect and value the Lenten season as an important stage of a yearly spiritual cycle. Even without the fun of presents and decorations and a big holiday meal, even with a focus on mortality and where we’ve fallen short. Even with the sobriety and seriousness, and maybe even with a reminder of death smeared across the forehead on Ash Wednesday, the season of Lent is not a worthless downer, but a valuable spiritual step forward and upward.

Here is what Lent offers the spiritually serious.

For 40-days, each year, a season to observe who you really are as a human being, and remember who you are really called to be. 40-days to do some sober self-reflection. A chance to ask, Where am I on my spiritual trip? How am I doing on my task of growing a soul? If the Unitarian Universalist spiritual path asks us to achieve salvation for ourselves by being the perfected people that we can be, how are we doing? 40 days to remind yourself that you are after all a mortal being and that your time on earth is limited. 40 days to notice what you’ve really done, so far, with this one life you’ve been given. 40 days to be honest about your short-comings, while you’ve still got a chance to work on them.

You might find it helpful to give up something for Lent. That’s a helpful way to remind you to keep pushing forward on the self-reflection work that the season is supposed to be about. I prefer, instead, most years, to add something for Lent, to take up some spiritual practice, like journaling, or reading, or exercise, or meditation; or to learn some new skill that will help move me toward becoming that person that I want to be.

The bottom line Lenten question, for every Unitarian Universalist, is, “What would a real Unitarian Universalist look like, and do I look like that guy?” What would my life look like if I really lived by the principles that I proclaim each Sunday? What would my relationships look like if they were founded on justice and compassion? How diligently am I searching for truth and meaning? How am I participating in the democratic process in my congregation and society at large? How would I spend my days if I more completely contributed my life to the goal that is the goal of my faith: a world community with peace, liberty, and justice for all?

40 days isn’t actually a very long time to create a vision of what a real UU life would look like for me, and honestly assessing the life I’ve created so far, and notice the difference between my current life, and the life I feel my faith calls my to lead. And then to put together an action plan with some concrete steps for change, and maybe learn a new skill, that will get me from here to there.

40 days from today, not counting Sundays, we’ll arrive at Easter, the holiday of new life. Easter comes with a miracle of re-birth, of a re-awakening to a new reality, of a new chance at life after we thought the old life was finished for us. If we do nothing between now and then, then the Easter miracle is the kind of empty fiction rational UUs often accuse if of being. It’s just magic, and superstition, and might be temporarily uplifting without being really transforming.

But if we take the 40 days of Lent between now and then seriously, if we do our work, if we commit to our practice, if we name the changes we want to make and we do what we need to do to make the changes really possible, then our Easter can be earned. We can have an Easter we deserve. We can celebrate a new life at Easter that isn’t just a myth and a miracle, but is the lived truth and the new reality of who we are.