After going through this Holy Week and finally reaching the joyous day of Easter, we will have gone through the whole length of Lent. Indeed, we are told that the word “Lent” has its roots in “long,” with the Old English “lencten” meaning spring. We can make a guess and say that perhaps it has to do with the lengthening of day during spring.
But the fact that Lent traditionally lasts for 40 days tells us that it is perhaps really meant to be experienced as a very long period, since we are also told that in the Biblical tradition that is what the number 40 really signified (among other things).
Lent is not just meant to be experienced as a very long period, but also as a very long period in an utterly barren place that is the desert. And that can be quite frightening. Because we are also told that the number 40 in the Bible meant a period of testing, spending 40 days in the desert must be the ultimate test.
What are we being tested for? What is being tested—measured—by the length of Lent?
As Kafka once observed, “the distance to my fellow-men is for me a very long one.” Imagine then the distance between God and mortals! We cannot even begin to fathom the terror of this distance, a terror that can be deadening in its silence. Even the Son of Man experienced the deadening silence of this distance when, in the very moment when He needed comfort and assurance, He felt abandoned by His very own Father.
But the distance between God and mortals becomes palpable not just as we experience the absence or even withdrawal of God, but also when in our sinfulness and capacity for evil we realize we cannot be helped except through the grace of God.
Retreating into the desert and staying there for 40 days can really be a most frightening prospect, not just because the desert is barren, but also because there is nothing much to do there. In the desert, boredom can kill us in a much more terrifying way than the lack of water and food can.
The German word for boredom is “Langeweile,” literally, a very long while. Boredom is the experience of a very long while during which there is hardly anything to do. Our contemporary world detests boredom, and so we either suppress it or cover it over. “Kill boredom,” says one billboard ad for jeans.
But the German thinker, Heidegger, tells us that boredom is a profound human experience that we would do better not to run away from, but rather bear in the fullness of its weight. Boredom contains within it the possibility of letting us see ourselves and the world with clear eyes, precisely at that moment when the world and its meaning seems to slip away from our hands, when a seemingly unbridgeable distance stands between us and everything we hold dear and familiar.
Perhaps our question then is not only what it is that the length of Lent measures—to which we replied initially as perhaps the measure of the distance between God and mortals. Perhaps an equally decisive question is what allows us to measure this distance, this length that is Lent.
The German poet, Hölderlin, tells us that poetry is the measure of the distance between mortals and the divine, and that we mortals measure ourselves against the divine all the time. That is the reason why we call ourselves, and us alone, mortals, even though we assume that animals and plants die, too. We are mortals only as measured against the immortal God.
This “poet of poets,” as Heidegger called Hölderlin, also meant that poetry is the measure of all measures. The same poet said that “full of merit, yet poetically the human being dwells,” reminding us that it is not all the things and benefits that we derive from the earth by and in themselves that will enable us to live human lives, however full we are of them. Rather, it is the way we dwell on earth that makes us human.
John the Evangelist must have sensed God to be a poet (or the poet in God) when he described with such beauty and simplicity what the Incarnation was all about: “the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us.”
My former teacher in Filipino literature, the poet Benilda Santos, once told our class that the reason why the Pharisees and the scribes never understood Jesus was that He was speaking poetically all the time, whereas the former were trapped in legalistic (and even moralistic) thinking. Indeed only through poetic sensitivity and insight can one understand the Teacher when He tells us to look at the birds in the sky and the lilies in the field in order not to be crippled by useless anxieties, or that He would destroy the temple and build it again after three days, or that the bread He was about to break was His body.
To be sure, the Pharisees and the scribes were also measuring all the time. But their measure was not poetic. Theirs was the measure of calculation and control, of scheming and machinations. Fundamentally, they were measuring everything against themselves, and thereby were to be found wanting.
Thus, only the pure, poetic soul can really go through the whole length of Lent. Without poetry—which is a gift, and a gift most supreme—we cannot even begin to understand what it means for us to be dust, and how unto dust we shall return. Without poetry we cannot understand why it is in dying that we can live, and how only by denying ourselves can we gain everything. Without poetry we cannot understand the glory in the very humiliation of the Cross.
What is the length of Lent? What does the length of Lent measure?
Only poetry—the measure of all measures—can enable us not only to go through the length of Lent, but also to realize that only in bearing the weight of the distance between God and mortals do we discover His abiding nearness.
But if God must be a poet—He is, after all, the Word made flesh, who dwelt among us—then He Himself is the measure of all measures. He is Poetry made flesh. And so as we endure this very long time in the desert—the whole length of Lent—may we find, as we stand before the Cross and await His glorious resurrection, our true measure.
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