Dear Friends in Christ,

This weekend, we mark Laetare Sunday.

It’s one of the two “break” days during penitential seasons. You’ll remember them as the days we wear rose vestments and, in Advent, light a rose colored candle in the Advent wreath. This is why this one is often called Rose Sunday, as well.

The lighter vestments are traditionally also joined with the use of “Alleluia” in the liturgy, which is not used during Lent and generally discouraged during Advent. Some churches will also sing the Gloria, which is also generally suspended during Advent and Lent.

Traditionally, this was a time when those who were preparing for Baptism would undergo preparation for Baptism at Easter. This has been so from the earliest days of the Church. Weeks, months, and sometimes years of preparation would go into their work toward becoming part of the Body of Christ. In the early Church, this was not a choice to be made lightly.

One could be persecuted or killed for making this choice.

It is still not a choice to be made lightly.

I spoke with a bishop from Sudan who told me of an Easter Sunday where they were baptizing thousands of people at a service. They had heard that planes were going to bomb the service so they were baptizing as many as they could as quickly as they could.

Someone asked, were you trying to finish the service so you could get away? He answered, “No. They wanted to be baptized when they died.” And as the service was underway, the planes came and the bombs were dropped. And so many were made martyrs. They were baptized when they died.

It is still not a choice to be made lightly.

Our chief threat, however, in the West is not so much persecution, as such. Our chief threat is a kind of bland indifference. We risk domesticating the wild, fierce love of Christ with a kind of bourgeois placidity.

Baptism and Communion are the gifts of the God who set the stars and oceans on their course; they are the gift of Christ Crucified; they are the gift of the Holy Spirit who breathed the Pentecost fire. Choosing Christ should not be done lightly, nor should the power of the choice to change our lives be taken for granted.

Lent is a time for facing with courage the truth of our lives and the deeper possibilities of life in Christ.

It’s a reset on the spiritual auto-pilot we often find ourselves busied into. We all get stuck in a kind of rut from time to time and too often we then don’t see a way out.

So Lent gives us the gift of reminding us that we still have the capacity, with God’s help, to change and be changed.

That is perhaps the most crucial of Lenten disciplines—that we take the gift of life so seriously that we believe it always worth the work of the kind of attention we are often too distracted to give.

Taking Lent seriously is a risky thing. It promises that things might change. But change is always happening. It’s either the kind of change brought by a kind of spiritual deferred maintenance, where suddenly we realize that our spirits are broken not from abuse but from a lack of use.

Or, it can be the kind of change where a bit of focused prayer, some work of fasting, some acts of charity, some progress toward reconciliation and repentance can all lead to a renewed sense of the possibility of our lives.

Across history, the faithful have come to Christ with nothing but the deep sense that he was worth even dying for. Lent asks us if he’s worth living for. And it’s still not a choice to be made lightly.

Yours in Christ,

—Fr Robert