Do you commemorate Lent?  Unless you attend a liturgical church, you probably do not.  But we all can learn from the idea behind it.  Lent is a season of preparation, a time of penance and austerity that grounds the effusiveness of Easter and its celebration of Jesus' resurrection.  We all can learn from penance and contemplation, from taking time to withdraw from or let go of that to which we normally cling, from giving up that to which we are accustomed to regularly do so as to make ourselves open to new insights into what life means.  As most religions, not just Christianity, observe, it is often only when we give up that we receive, that when we relinquish that we really learn what existence is all about.  What will we learn from in constant abundance?
     Lent is a way to take ourselves into the real rawness and fragility of what it is to be human.  In Lent, we see afresh that being human is recognizing that we live in delicate balance between achievement and denouement, glory and brokenness, magnificence and tragedy.  It is a way to see that though we rejoice in the grace given us, we should grasp ever more powerfully the tremendous weight of its price.  Lent tells us that we have our abundance only because God gave up, for a season, his own.