"Labor" | Reflection by the Rev. Charles Lemert

In some ways “labor” is a strange word for Lent, a time usually meant for standing back from life’s harder times to reflect on the self-inside and to world-beyond. Yet, few will be surprised that the dictionary defines “labor” as the “expenditure of physical or mental effort especially when difficult or compulsory.”

What comes to mind is forced labor for the incarcerated. In one sense this could be proper for serious Christian folk. It could be said that we, here on earth, are incarcerated in the prison house of finitude. No matter how good we are, nor how hard we work at loving others, there is no escaping the hard fact that we will die dead, irrevocably. Of course, to qualify death as that which cannot be reversed is at odds with the faith many of us profess as resurrection—ours perhaps, but also of our dead loved ones who have gone on.

As it happens, such a belief is hard work. It demands that we trust that once dead they and we will live again. This surely is why “labor” is also the word for the hard work by which a mother suffers as their cervix is forced open by the contractions in her uterus—thus to give birth to that living being who had been turning this way and that inside.

Lent, then, should be hard labor as we, whatever our genders, suffer the pangs of our unborn souls, seeking fresh air and new life.