Unspiration: Lent as Spell Breaker

Perhaps we need a better name than Lent. Or perhaps this is the perfect name. Perhaps what needs to be done is shaking off the patina of guilt laden Catholicism of this season. I find myself in Lent reading the Bible not only for inspiration, but unspiration, that process of reading old sacred texts, taking them for what they are and, because of what they are, finding my way through the holes, reinterpreting or, more often, discarding them. This is the opposite of being enchanted. I am being unchanted, dispelling instead of being put in the spell of three thousand years of bad thinking.

            Having gotten through the book of Joel and moved onto the prophet Amos, there is a definite theme of prophetic verbal diarrhea, endless diatribes that amount to, “The reason your crops don’t grow is because God is angry at you. Why don’t you repent so your crops can grow?” The human mind looks for a reason, or so we are told, for certain things and the reason the prophets give is, “You are sinful. This is your fault. Repent ,and it will get better.” By these standards, penitence becomes its own sort of black witchcraft. So, already, in these precursors to Lent, a magic drama is being acted out. In place of wailing for Damuzi, we are now wailing for our own sins, real and mostly imagined, to an angry god so that our crops will grow and our lives will be better.

            But underneath this is another subtler strain. One must peer carefully, for the old Testament prophets are full of rage, misogyny, over exaggeration and a tendency to call women whores and write graphically about rape and menstrual blood. But repentance is a call to first loves. In the later Christian Lent, which partially reflects this, it is a time to strengthen commitments, remember original loves, and test the current loves to see if they are worth having, a time to put down and pick up. It is thusly we pass over a dry land of dead grass and just barely wakening dreams and see a river flaming with fiery serpents. Its heat refreshes and terrifies, and on the other side, we glimpse, in its warm and golden beauty, Caer Daplas, the Castle of Revelry.