Pop Culture Reflections on Lent

The Beatitudes, especially Jesus’ words in Luke 6, aren’t your typical Lenten passage. There’s nothing about repentance. Nothing about fasting or prayer. At least not on the surface. But if you need a nudge toward self-examination as we turn our eyes toward the cross, the Beatitudes are a great place to start.

In the Beatitudes, Christ diagnoses who is “blessed”—the poor, the hungry, the weeping—and, in Luke, who is headed for “woe”—the rich, the full, the laughing. Then there’s my personal favorite (or should I say least favorite): “Woe to you when everyone speaks well of you. . .” The Beatitudes hold up a mirror to our lives to help us see past surface “woes” and “blessings,” to help us recognize what’s really going on.

To make the wise words of Jesus come alive, Christians have traditionally practiced fasting, almsgiving, and prayer during Lent to clear out the deceptive clutter and see more clearly what God’s trying to show. And what is God trying to get through our hard hearts and noggins? Here’s a movie, a television miniseries, and a song that might help us get started.

Fasting: Can You Ever Forgive Me?

Lee Israel (Melissa McCarthy) is a hard-bitten, down-on-her-luck New Yorker. In a bout of writer’s block, she pays the rent and preserves her pride by crafting counterfeit letters from famous authors and selling them to the literati.

At first the scheme saves her from debt, snobs, an inattentive agent, and from addressing her alcohol problem. The lies become wilder, her prose more brilliant, and her payouts fatter. But as her relationships—already on the rocks (so to speak)—start to break, we see it’s not just her career that’s on the line. Lee watches black-and-white rom coms until she can quote them. She adores her tuxedo cat. Her solitude gets a romantic, jazzy soundtrack. Under Lee’s bitter cunning and sharp wit, there’s a heart aching for love.

Lee knows what it is to be hungry, poor, and weeping into her whiskey. Now, to receive the goods that make life worth living—forgiveness, love—can she face up to the fullness she’s failed to find?

Fasting is practice in giving up what comforts or fills us. Fasting empties us to identify with the pangs of poverty—others’ and our own. Can You Ever Forgive Me? is a great way to consider the “woes” of false fullness and ill-gotten gains, as well as how someone might start turning—even with plenty of f-bombs—to the “blesseds.”

Almsgiving: Emma

If Lee Israel is a woman at the bottom of her game, Emma Woodhouse is at the top. Rich, full, laughing, the whole of Highbury speaks well of Emma, even as she wreaks havoc as a self-appointed matchmaker. The BBC/PBS 2009 adaptation of Jane Austen’s story helps us follow Emma’s Lenten arc.

While others “trust their fortune to strangers,” Emma (Romola Garai) grows up with “very little to distress or vex her.” And so (alas) her giving nature develops alongside a sense of superiority. Even as she gives time and attention generously to others, we catch her inside jokes in small asides and her justification for small acts of selfishness through inner monologues. We watch how clever Emma floats over the distress of others like a cheerful butterfly. She is safe from the painful frays of love, even as she herself causes them.

One of the most telling details is one that the miniseries adds to Austen’s story. When Emma is little, she plays with dolls and pretends they are people; when she gets older, her most truthful friend, Mr. Knightley (Jonny Lee Miller), accuses her of treating people like dolls.

Giving alms is to face (or even touch) the person to whom we’re giving. We face their poverty, hunger, or weeping in a kind of mirror, invited to see ourselves in the faces of our neighbors. Emma learns that real giving doesn’t work at a protected distance. It will take a loving confrontation to crack through Emma’s shell of good luck. It will take good humor to face her own poverty, offer alms that truly cost her, and open new opportunities for pardon and love.

Prayer: “Spiegel im Spiegel” by Arvo Pärt

If you take refuge in words (like Lee and witty Emma), wordlessness is a good way to face yourself. Arvo Pärt is an Eastern Orthodox musician who has influenced artists from Björk to Nick Cave, creating instrumental music that often has the feel of prayer.

His 1978 composition “Spiegel im Spiegel” is a 10-minute piece that means “Mirror within mirror.” The Apostle Paul says that, even at our moments of greatest spiritual clarity, it’s still as if we’re only seeing “through a glass, darkly.” Even after a flash of insight, we still have to cultivate the ability to continue to see—or to hear past the convincing voice of pride.

The song provides nearly 10 minutes to sit still and do just that. Ebbs and flows of cello and piano repeat with only subtle variations, yet in it we start to notice not just a theme, but a dialogue. The piano notes, bubbling in a sweet, almost changeless pattern at the top of the scale, call to the mournful cello down below. Is the cello calling back? Is it absorbed in its own music? At moments, the cello starts to lift toward the piano. The piano lifts, too, in occasional breakaway notes so high they almost hurt. The dialogue is repetitive but patient and beautiful.

Lenten prayer is practice in facing silence, facing weakness, facing ineptitude, facing ourselves. But it’s also practice in turning toward the One who is always calling to us patiently, lifting our music out of its self-absorbed patterns. God is calling broken humans to join the music of heaven. It reaches down to our lowest, most woeful notes to lift them into the highest, almost scale-breaking blesseds. Lee Israel, Emma Woodhouse, and Arvo Pärt give us hope that our sin doesn’t stop the song—and that we might just stop to listen.

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At Think Christian, we encourage careful cultural discernment. We recognize and respect that many Christians choose not to engage with pop culture that contains particular content, such as abuse, sex, violence, alcohol or drug use, or that employs the use of coarse language. To that end, we suggest visiting Common Sense Media for detailed information regarding the content of the particular pieces of pop culture discussed in this article.