my legalistic Lent.

I like challenges. I also enjoy legalism. (It’s so easy!) So, when I was assigned the task of a “Public Scholarship Project” in a class dealing with the spirituality of environmental issues, I was ready.

Here comes Lent. Eating is a spiritual issue with environmental dimensions. Obviously, I’m going to go strictly vegetarian for 40 days. This is a game with simple rules that promises a certain amount of smugness at its end. Who am I kidding? A certain amount of smugness throughout. “Hey, do you wanna grab some Chick-fil-A?” “Oh, yeah, no. Sorry. Gave up meat for Lent, because I love the Lord [more than you do].”

Only, the smugness never came. The rules weren’t so easy. And games are fun.

I gave up meat for Lent, and lived to tell about it. Please join me, as I tell.

Join me in my questions. Help me grapple with the things I learned—some funny things (most vegetarian food is kind of funny), some contentious academic things (Adam and Eve were vegetarians?), and a lot of things that defy categorization as merely funny or contentious, or spiritual.

It has been my experience that any time that God is sincerely sought is a time in which He will move in ways both deeply compassionate, and terrifying. This season has held both. I sought God with questions about the meaning of fasting, and about His provision for us. I set out to understand what it means for me to be a being dependent upon the workings of an intricate system of biology, and sociology and economics. I wanted to know how the most mundane of my weekly tasks, grocery shopping, affects that system, and how my identity as a Christian, and my relationship to a living God, is intertwined with the answers to those queries.

I can’t say that I received the answers to all of my questions. I can say that I’m better for having asked them. That my eyes are open a little wider. That my time with my God goes a little deeper.

I gave up meat for 40 days (37, actually—we’ll get to that). But I’m different for the rest of my days. What about you? Have you had any similar experiences with Lent, or fasting in general? Do you think that faith and eating are related issues? Can someone honor God with their choices in food? And, if so, can we also then dishonor God with our choices of food?

a living sacrifice. or something.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote:

"To his first disciples Jesus was bodily present, speaking his word directly to them. But this Jesus died and is risen. How, then, does his call to discipleship reach us today? Jesus no longer walks past me in bodily form and calls, "Follow me," as he did to Levi, the tax collector. Even if I would be truly willing to listen, to leave everything behind, and to follow, what justification do I have for doing so? What for the first disciples as so entirely unambiguous is for me a decision that is highly problematic and fraught with uncertainty...There is something wrong with...these questions. Every time we ask them, we place ourselves outside the living presence of the Christ. All of these questions refuse to take seriously that Jesus Christ is not dead but alive and still speaking to us today through the testimony of Scripture. He is present with us today, in bodily form and with his word. If we want to hear his call to discipleship, we need to hear it where Christ himself is present. It is within the church that Jesus Christ calls through his word and sacrament."

I read this, and wonder...what is "the church"?

Is the church a building? Is it a place that we gather? Or is it a body of people who all believe the same thing? And if so, what's the defining belief? What does someone have to say to "get in?" That Christ lived? That He died? That He lives now? Is the church a continuous historical structure? Despite our ideological differences, is my "church" one and the same as an Eastern Orthodox Christian's?

And what of Bonhoeffer's reference to "word and sacrament?" Bonhoeffer believed, as do I, that there is a living presence in Christianity, and that this presence of Christ is experienced through scripture practiced from the church. But...interpretations of scripture, uses of sacrament, and even canonical scripture itself differ greatly within the church (I'm remembering the first time I tried to find the book of "Ecclesiasticus" in my NIV).

If Bonhoeffer is right, and Christ lives through His church and His word--these are weighty questions. Coincidentally, if Bonhoeffer is wrong, and Christ isn't a living being at all, they are still weighty questions. Christian or not, "the church" is a force in American political and cultural life.

So, what do you believe? Do you consider (or have you ever considered) yourself to be living inside of "the church"? And what does that mean to you? Is Christ alive for you in the same sense that Bonhoeffer seems to imply? Can we connect with a living deity through the Christian scriptures?

All good questions. Many implications.

On a side note--I have plenty of questions and implications to go around, and go around they will, on Tuesdays and Fridays. Fun!

on a fool's errand.

If you're reading this, you probably know me. You are my friend, my classmate, my brother, or mother, or father, or that guy who knows that girl you met at what his name's house three months ago, who I used to be friends with. Oh, the wonders of Facebook...

So you probably know that I'm a psychology student at Missouri State University. That I got my undergraduate degree at a lovely little snob-vent called Knox College, in the cloistered halls of liberal academia. Maybe that I love to read, and write, and that I study religious motivation. You might even know that I moved to southwest Missouri last year, from the Chicago area, and what a last year it has been.

You know Ashley, and hopefully the complete Ashley that I am. You're aware that I laugh when I get nervous. That I have an impressive knack for saying inappropriate things in sensitive moments. And that I pretend to be terrible with names just in case I forget yours, but am actually an above-average name-memorizer.

What you might not know is that I am a girl passionately after God.

You might not know that my interest in theology is very much a personal quest. That for all of the churches I've walked into, my heart has left very few. And that when I tell you in casual conversation that religion is fascinating, I am telling you that God is intriguing. I am showing you my heart.

I don't always understand everything I see, or hear, or feel, but no one does. I do know that I'm willing to be wrong, and that I will gladly be a fool, to find God.

Feel free to be a little foolish with me, if you dare.