“During this Lenten season, we remember the deep love Jesus Christ showed to the world: dying on the cross to defeat death so that we may have eternal life with our Creator,” said Palm Beach Atlantic University (PBA) President Dr. Debra A. Schwinn. “In this article, PBA Assistant Professor of Theology Dr. Austin Stevenson reflects on how Lent helps us respond to such love. For 40 days, we can turn away from our earthly desires with intention and focus our hearts on the One who provides and loves us beyond our wildest longings, worries, and dreams.”
Forty Days in the Dust
For you are dust, and to dust you shall return (Genesis 3:19)
What strength there is in my hands was born of struggle against the impenetrable clay of the Great Plains. I came to know the size of an acre by coaxing draggled gulleys with a pickaxe across the rigid earth. With each swing, I wondered at the forces that compressed the ground with such power, dwarfing even the bison that once roamed those lands 50 million strong. That plot would yield no crops but scrub brush and tumbleweed. It will not do to understand a place until you know its soil.
I decided to plant a tree in my yard. These days I live in South Florida, and it was my first time breaking out a shovel in this climate. I set aside the whole morning, remembering well the long struggle to chip away the ground back home. Ten minutes later, I was finished and astonished. The ground was sand all the way down. From where would this tree draw nutrients? Where would it anchor its roots? Two years later, it is as tall as my house, though it leans toward the setting sun. I am beginning to understand this place.
By mid-February the weather has cooled, and all that has breath sighs with relief. As the days begin to lengthen, Christians follow the footsteps of Christ into the wilderness, fasting in the dust-blown desert for 40 days like Noah, Moses, and Elijah before Him (Matthew 4:1-11). One tenth of the year: a tithe of our days to God. In English, we call this season ‘Lent,’ which means springtime: a season of renewal. It is a period of fasting, prayer, and charity to prepare for the celebration of the Resurrection.
It will not do to understand a person until you know they are soil. We are dust quickened by the breath of God. In Lent, we return to the dust to be enlivened anew. We pray to know God so that we might see ourselves as beloved dirt. We fast so that we might feel in our gut the restlessness of our hearts and ground them in “the love that moves the sun and other stars,” as Dante put it. We give alms out of a recognition that our very being is a gift—an undeserved share in the divine life.
Lent teaches us that we do not possess things, they possess us. The things we desire are not like items on a shelf; they are like rivers with a force and direction all their own. And they are dust. Prayer, fasting, and charity draw attention to our wanting, providing perspective on the force and flow of these rivers. To sit with our hunger instead of feeding it makes us reflective about who we are, for our character is but the sum of our longings.
In Lent, we offer up our longings to God so that hope may be rekindled within us: hope crucified, buried in the earth, and risen to new life on the far horizon of this Lenten wilderness.
Dr. Austin Stevenson is an assistant professor of theology. Before joining PBA, he was a junior research fellow at the University of Oxford, where he studied Christian vaccine hesitancy in collaboration with the Oxford Vaccine Group and the Vaccine Knowledge Project. He is passionate about theological education, bridging the gap between systematic theology and biblical scholarship. He earned his Ph.D. in Theology from the University of Cambridge and a Master of Arts in Doctrinal Theology and a Master of Theology from Regent College.