A Brief Lenten Word Inspired by MLK

Potent wisdom for your lenten journey about materialism and growth of the soul

Somehow Lent is nearly upon us.

Last fall I was thinking a great deal about Lent as I wrapped up a section on the season for my forthcoming church year devotional.

Most of my “insights” on the season are stored there — including this thought on the dangers of the DIY-ification of Lent — but Dr. King has a word that feels wildly potent and apt for Lent.

Listen to Dr. King on nations and communities being materially rich yet spiritually impoverished:

"One of the great problems of mankind is that we suffer from a poverty of spirit, which stands in glaring contrast to our scientific and technological abundance. The richer we have become materially, the poorer we have become morally and spiritually... enlarged material powers spell enlarged peril if there is not proportionate growth of the soul."¹

This strikes me as a profoundly Lenten observation.

In Lent, we confess that our personal and national material abundance—full fridges, ubiquitous wi-fi, consumer comforts, AI breakthroughs, endless entertainment, 2-day shipping—have not made us obedient and grateful to God and generous to our neighbors or other nations.

Instead, in more ways than we wish to admit we’ve become spiritually sluggish, frantically consumptive, and morally shallow. MLK's observation is sadly true.

Photo by Megan Watson on Unsplash

There is good news from an unexpected source: Lent.

Or, rather, the experience of God’s purifying grace in the season of Lent.

In Lent, through repentance, fasting, almsgiving, and prayer, the God of all healing-mercy promises by his grace to enlarge our souls. God reshapes our soul-body appetites as we abstain from good things to feast on the one true good in the practice of love.

Lent is a time of soul renovation, and if we rightly understand the season as communal, it is a season in which communities are renovated into the way of Jesus.

I can’t help but think of Augustine’s words on the soul in conjunction with King’s.

In Confessions, Augustine prays:

“My soul is like a house, small for you to enter, but I pray you to enlarge it. It is in ruins, but I ask you to remake it. It contains much that you will not be pleased to see: this I know and do not hide. But who is to rid it of these things?”²

There is so much to be rid of in me, in you, and in us — so much in our life together and in this world that needs to be remade.

Lent is part of that healing, renovating, enlarging work.

The great fast of Lent will lead to the great feast of Easter and through the journey, we ourselves are remade and transformed.

1. From Dr. King’s Nobel Speech Prize. Dr. King delivered this lecture in the Auditorium of the University of Oslo: https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/peace/1964/king/lecture/

2. Saint Augustine, Confessions, trans. Pine-Coffin (New York: Penguin, 1961), 24.