lenten metrics

Years ago I had a fleeting career teaching elementary school. 

I went back to school for a grad degree in teaching when our first two children were toddlers and by the time I got around to doing my student teaching, I was working on child #3. (She was born one week after the end of the last semester…)  By the time I got around to (re-)entering the workforce, I ended up taking a job in the guidance department of the elementary school (instead of a classroom job) and worked with children with social and emotional needs. It was a great job and a launching pad, really, for my later ministry with children and families with special needs. 

While I worked at the school, there was a mini-revolution about report cards and the grading system.  Like many other mainstream schools, ours followed the usual metrics employing letter grades (A, B, C, D, F) with the added option of plusses (+) or minuses. (-).  I was very familiar with this system from my own 17 years in K-College and, more recently, the 3 years in grad school. (There were a limited number of courses in college that one could take Pass/Fail, but I never took the option- I wasn’t sure how I would operate with that kind of “freedom” and so I stuck to the traditional metrics.)

 In the elementary school where I worked, we voted to try on a new system of grading that gave me flashbacks to my own chaotic, “cluster-‘structured’ (sic)” years in 4^th, 5^th and 6^th grade when we all sat in an open-space classroom singing kumbyah and playing with different colored rods and blocks instead of learning our multiplication tables.   In the elementary school where I worked, we decided to forgo letter grades and to offer, instead, “categories of learning achievement.”  I forget, now, but the categories were something like “exceptional,”  “demonstrating proficiency,”  “in progress,” and “not yet making progress or making minimal progress” toward meeting standards. 

Make sense?

Yeah, in some ways, the words just replaced the old “A, B, C, D” and the dreaded “F”… but the new system was supposed to be more supportive, ego-strengthening, upbeat and nuanced. It was the 1990s.  I found it confusing-  as a teacher and as a parent- and I longed for the good old days.  It wasn’t that I was opposed to change as much as I liked the familiar world of letter grades which had, as their underpinning, numerical ranges of test scores to support them:  ie:  a “B” and its neighbors, B- and B+ were assigned to scores in the range of 80-89. It was neat, tidy, and one knew exactly where one stood. There were no grey areas with the A-F system.

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So.. swallow all that.  And the fact that I’m a rule-following-middle-child and an order-loving-Virgo to boot and then, imagine my reaction when a colleague recently quoted his priestly-Grandfather on the subject of Lenten Discipline:  “If you do it too well, you'll miss the point.”*   

 That’s right.  If you get an “A” in Lent, you’re not doing it right.

I laughed when I heard this… and then loved the sentiment for its theological right-ness:  Lent is designed to be (partly) an experience of spiritual striving and even a bit of a struggle.  If we choose to follow our (self-selected) disciplines to perfection, (with an “E” for “exceptional”) either we haven’t selected a program rigorous enough or allowed ourselves the grace of living fully human.   What’s the point of making it 40 days without chocolate or wine?  What’s the pay-off for adding a new prayer practice or reading a new spiritual tome?  It’s not the successful completion of these things… it’s certainly not a superior smugness that comes with having “done it all right.”  The metrics of Lent are not measured in what we’ve completed with efficiency or unfailing competence.  The metrics of Lent are about embracing the ragged edges of our humanity that become softened by our very practice-  including our failings.

As I processed all of this, standing in front of my friend, I imagined that perhaps the coveted bowl of ice cream could be mine before Lent’s end.  But this theological nuance is not a “get-out-of-jail-free” card, either.   No, if I were to “fail” and dive into the Ben & Jerry’s it would be unplanned, unintended and forgiven-  like many of our sins that cut much deeper than the illicit bowl of forbidden ice cream.

I loved this new mind-bending, curiously wry twist to Lent:  “If you do it too well, you’ll miss the point.”

What do you think?

* these are the words of The Rev. Churchill J. Gibson  who was rector of St. James Episcopal Church, Richmond, VA from 1929-1957.