Five years of Lent is too much
A Lenten Reflection
Our lives changed five years ago. Maybe you don’t know someone who died during those dark days in early 2020 and maybe you aren’t someone who faces an uncertain future with long COVID. But our society is marked irrevocably by the collective trauma of the pandemic—whether we realize or acknowledge it. 2020 has become a short-hand for horrible.
“2025 is just five 2020s in a trench coat,” I joked this week. “It’s five times as awful.”
Five years ago, the virus spread swiftly on the heels of Ash Wednesday. I cannot think of Lent without thinking of COVID-19. In the last few years, I gave up observing Lent and other church holidays, partly because it felt like I was living in a Lent that would not end. And to be honest, that unrelenting Lent revealed a bitter truth that drove me out of comfortable Christianity.
The Anglican Church in North America was my home from 2004 to 2020, though my discomfort with their theology started long before 2020. The pandemic simply laid bare the fissures hiding under the rug. As I chat with survivors who have escaped cults and high-control churches, 2020 was a finger snap that broke people out of their hypnotized state. When you stop spending all of your time with other cult members, you suddenly gain the distance needed to wake up.
One pastor told me with concern that they needed to return to in-person services before people got out of the habit of coming to church. I thought that was a telling comment—if people only attend your church out of habit, perhaps some self-examination is in order.
In July 2021, the finger snapped in my life and I woke up. A few Facebook posts popped up—something about Twitter and my ACNA diocese. I didn’t have a Twitter account, but I could go over to lurk. I started reading the accounts of sexual abuse and cover-ups shared by this group called #ACNAtoo and found the extensive documentation convincing. Convincing and devastating.
My default mode is to dig into the primary sources. So I did. I methodically went through 20 years of website crawls. I dug into years of Vimeo and Issuu caches. I went back through blog posts and social media profiles. I searched for 501(c)3 filings and data. I even ran background checks. If it was public and online, I probably looked at it. What I found confirmed what I hoped wouldn’t be true: the patterns of spiritual abuse were all there—the concentration of power, elitism, manipulation, secrecy, excessive control, and forced accountability.
It only took a few weeks before I joined the fledgling ACNAtoo team. At first, I saw it as my duty to play a part in rectifying the cover-up of abuse in my diocese. Then I realized that the rot had spread far beyond the confines of one diocese. The ACNA had years to watch the Catholic church abuse scandals—plus the #metoo and #churchtoo movements—and learn their lesson. Instead, they wedged themselves into a “surely not us” corner.
Responding well to abuse in your church is hard because it requires you to acknowledge that the abuse exists. It requires you to admit that Lenten confessions of general remorse don’t cut it. As my friend Heather says, “Everyone is against abuse and mishandling when it is an abstraction and costs them nothing.”
I started to see a correlation between how US churches responded to the events of 2020—a pandemic, Black Lives Matter protests, the election—and how they responded to abuse in their midst. Churches either prioritized the vulnerable in their communities or they didn’t.
I am a very different person in 2025 because of what I have experienced in the last five years. I am the person who runs background checks on my phone while chopping vegetables for dinner. I am the person who carries stories of murder, sex trafficking, torture, and other unspeakable sins as I play Uno with my son. I do not regret what I know, but it has changed me.
This weekend, I’m gathering with a few women who have been my daily companions since 2021. We rarely get to meet in person because we’re spread around the country. The technological advancements of the pandemic have made it possible to conduct advocacy work completely online. But this weekend isn’t for work—it’s for rest. We care for others, but we struggle to make time for ourselves.
The world is dark right now. Lent marches on, covered in ashes.
May we find light in the companionship of kindred spirits. May we find joy in small acts of resistance. May we find hope in the children who come after us.
Peace be with you this weekend.
“I started to see a correlation between how US churches responded to the events of 2020—a pandemic, Black Lives Matter protests, the election—and how they responded to abuse in their midst. Churches either prioritized the vulnerable in their communities or they didn’t.” Yeah, that says it all. That’s what I saw in 2020 and ad nauseam since then. The ones who were incensed at having to wear a mask were the ones who believed in “reverse racism,” disbelieved abuse survivors, promoted stringent traditional gender roles, argued that victims of police brutality deserved it, etc.
You and my wife could have some interesting chats. She worked at the Milwaukee Rescue Mission at the time of the pandemic and saw firsthand how devastating the bug was in the inner city. Out in the burbs it was more or less an inconvenience (or more specifically, it was regarded as such) but we do know people who died. Even in the face of suffering and death, it was all too common for people to worry more about whether their business would thrive, whether they would have a job or whether they would be able to go to a restaurant as opposed to whether their neighbors would be alive next month.
The pandemic didn’t just pull back the rug, it tied it to the back of a Dodge Charger and then floored it, ripping open the fissures for all to see. Even so, we didn’t all see. It was not the finest hour for the church. In fact, it may have been just the opposite. We could have been at the forefront of kicking this thing to the curb but instead we treated it as a political maneuver or worse, a hoax. We listened to all the wrong voices (talk radio, anti-vax propaganda, conspiracy theorists, etc.) and we are worse off for it.
Jim K.