Flannery O’Connor’s short story “Revelation” tells the story of Ruby Turpin, a proud, southern farmer’s wife who sits in a doctor’s waiting room taking stock of the other patients. She finds most of them to be dirty, rude, and common, and Ruby has very little to say to those kinds of people. Only one of them—a white woman sitting with a teenage daughter reading from a large book—appears worthy even of the effort to make small talk. Ruby notices that the woman is stylishly dressed, but she finds her daughter to be fat and ugly. The world, as Ruby sees it, is divided into different classes of people, and she is pleased to belong to one of the better classes. She even tells the stylish woman how grateful she is when she thinks that she could have ended up as a “colored person” or—even worse—as landless white trash; she thanks Jesus for making her the “respectable, hard-working, church-going woman” that she is.

What happens next is among my favorite moments in all of O’Connor’s stories. I will not spoil the surprise for those who have not read it, but suffice it to say that Ruby is not spared the encounter with sudden and spectacular violence on which O’Connor’s plots often turn. This violence, however, offers Ruby a moment of grace. It leaves her pride and sense of self utterly shattered by revealing to her that Jesus does not care how respectable she is, or how much land she owns, or even how hard-working she is. This is not a revelation that Ruby receives gladly. In one of the story’s last images, we see her standing in her farm field shaking her fist and shouting at God. “A final surge of fury shook her and she roared, ‘Who do you think you are?’”

Who exactly does God think He is? That is a good question to ask during Lent. A better question might be: who exactly do you think God is? We sometimes think that God exists to solve our problems, to make us happy and satisfied in our lives. But God cannot be defined in terms of our own wants and wishes; instead our lives must be defined in God’s terms. In Lent, Christians engage in practices that remind us of our need for God’s forgiveness and grace. We let go of things that we desire to make room in our hearts for new desires to grow. We let go of our idea of a God who exists to solve all our problems, so that we can discover the God of love, beauty, and redemption. Lent then is a journey, or at least the beginning of the journey to our new selves. In “A Packing List for Jerusalem,” Lisa Deam offers guidance about how to prepare for that journey. Just like medieval pilgrims, we must be ready to leave much of what we love behind, to press on into wild and unknown territory, to arrive before our God with nothing, and to have faith that Jesus will give us everything that we need.

In “Will Beauty Save the World?” Christ College Dean Peter Kanelos speaks not of a journey, but of a quest. Life is a quest for truth, and in the darkest, most discouraging moments of that quest, the way is sometimes lit by beauty, a flash of truth that bursts into our world to remind us of what has thus far eluded us. While Kanelos writes about beauty, Jennifer Ochstein considers a kind of ugliness. She describes learning of her own capacity for selfish cruelty and violence and wonders if this darkness is rooted in her very nature, encoded in her DNA. And even after embracing a faith that calls her to leave this part of her self behind and to live a life of kindness, love, and peace, she knows that the darkness lingers, waiting for her to come back and pick it up again.

The journey we make in Lent is not an easy one. We do not want to give up these lives that we think we have made for ourselves. Like Ruby, we will not be happy to be told that our pride in our own accomplishments is misplaced. Lent is a time to prepare ourselves for that truth, to begin our journey to a place where when grace descends on us—either in a flash of beauty and joy or after an explosion of violence and shock—we will be ready to accept this gift from the one who knows us better than we know ourselves.

                                                -JPO