Accompany me on a journey with me

I got ashed tonight for the first time in several years. I've never been very faithful about observing Ash Wednesday and Lent. For one thing, it's hard for me to get excited about it. I feel like I already spend a pretty significant portion of my inner life obsessing over my mortality, my weakness and my guilt. Do I personally need to spend 40 days really honing my religious neuroses? For another, I have a tendency to overthink the discipline part of Lent. I worry about what I should give up, and whether I'm giving up enough or too much, and am I giving up things that really take the place of God in my life or am I just aiming for some self-improvement, and what if I set too high a goal and fail at it, but wouldn't God be more pleased if I really sacrificed one of my emotional crutches even if I end up falling back on it later, but Christianity isn't about success or failure, and should I also be adding in things like daily Scripture reading and prayer, but shouldn't I be doing those anyway, and oh look, I seem to have hurled myself out a window.

Oh, I hate Lent. And by Lent, I mean my brain.

But I'm doing Lent this year. In the years when I have opted not to pick up the burdens of Lenten observance and live in the freedom I'm told I have in Christ, I have found that Holy Week and Easter are much less meaningful. I've tried to cram 40 days of mindful preparation into a few, and the journey to the cross and the grave has felt, maybe unsurprisingly, rushed and shallow and weightless. And I don't like that. I want more. I want to feel the creeping dread as Jesus approaches Jerusalem. I want to hang my head in shame in front of a church full of waving palm branches because I know that in a few days, we will be demanding to see blood and punishment. I want to cringe when Jesus touches the hand of his beloved Judas. I want to weep when the flesh is being ripped from Jesus' body by whips and nails. I want to fall silent when the veil covering the Holy of Holies in the temple is torn. I want to cry and sing and flail my hands in joy and wonder when Mary gets to hold her son again, once dead and now more alive than anything that has ever lived. And I'm pretty sure that it is Lent, that difficult season of self-denial and self-examination, that will bring all of this into focus. I've tried and failed to shortcut it before. I'm not doing that again this year.

Of course, I also have to wonder that if I'm just doing this to have a more meaningful Easter experience, isn't that pretty self-centered and might God prefer if I--O HAI OPEN WINDOW.