Restless

Most days, I don't eat until late. I wish I could tell you it's because I'm fasting — how very Lent of me that would be — but honestly, it's usually because I'm working. I skip breakfast (except coffee — there is always coffee) and work straight through lunch without noticing, until my hunger pangs stand up, do a little jig, and belt out a desperate number just trying to get my attention. Only then do I realize: Oh. I am hungry. I have been hungry for a while now.

It turns out, that's not just a thing that happens to my stomach. In his famous work, Confessions, Augustine of Hippo said it better than I can: "You have made us for yourself, Lord, and our hearts are restless until they rest in you." That restlessness, Augustine suggests, is not something to cure or outrun. It is a doorway. And Lent is the season that invites us to stop and actually stand in it.

By now we have likely heard the words. We have perhaps felt the smudge of ash, or the weight of what it means to say remember that you are dust. And now we are here–in the in-between, in the not-quite-yet, in the season that asks us to be honest about what we are actually hungry for.

Augustine knew something about hunger. He spent years trying to feed it with everything except the thing that could actually satisfy it. Ambition. Pleasure. Philosophy. Reputation. He was, by any measure, a brilliant and accomplished man–and he was restless. Profoundly, achingly restless.
Looking back on the broken road behind him, Augustine wrote those words, and named what had been true the whole time: We are made for something. Made toward something. The restlessness isn't a malfunction. It's a signal.

Lent invites us to pay attention to that signal.

We live in a world that is very good at keeping us distracted from our own depths. There is always another thing to scroll, another crisis to respond to, another obligation pulling at our sleeve. And we are not wrong to care about the world — caring is part of what it means to be people of faith. But even our caring can become a way of staying on the surface, of never quite getting to the question underneath all the other questions: What is my soul actually hungry for right now?

That is the Lenten question. Not primarily what we should give up, or what we should do differently, but what we are reaching for–and whether what we are reaching for can actually hold us.

We come to this season carrying all of it. The grief we haven't had time to sit with. The doubt we've been too busy to examine. The longing we can't quite name. The ways we have tried to satisfy a deep thirst with things that don't quite reach it.

Augustine's restlessness is ours. And so, perhaps, is his discovery: That the longing itself is not something to be ashamed of or fixed or argued away. It is the shape of us. It is the mark of being made for more than we can manufacture on our own.

One of the reasons Lent is my favorite season in the Church calendar year is that Lent doesn't ask us to have it figured out. It asks us to stop pretending we do.There is room here–in this season, in this community, in the practice of showing up and being honest before God–for the full weight of what we carry. The restlessness. The reaching. The not-yet-resting.

We are in good company. Augustine got there eventually. Our faith tradition tells us so do we.

So this week — find one quiet moment, even a brief one, to simply notice what your heart is reaching for. Don't fix it. Don't judge it. Just name it, honestly, as a prayer: This is what I am hungry for, Lord. That noticing, that naming—that is honest prayer. Which is, after all, just hunger with words. And that may very well be the most Lenten thing we do all week.

On the Lenten journey with you,
Pr. Melissa

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