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Lent is a season of Returns, of lost sheep, of redeemed souls asking again and again to find the center (the one that will hold). It is getting down to essentials, of raw encounters and sometimes brutal realizations. Ash and dust and the end of things. No Hallelujahs. No Triumph. Not yet.
To help you enter into this season of penitential waiting,1 I have focused in here on two sagas (so technically you’re getting a really extra bibliophilia edition here - seven books instead of the usual three!) that force us to engage in the long, often arduous journey of Lenten repentance. Ultimately both these sagas offer glimpses of Hope. Yet what I think may be more powerful is the many offerings of redemption that are rejected, because these are stories of human souls, and human souls are grasping and mistaken so much of the time. As Flannery O’Connor said,
“There is something in us, as storytellers and as listeners to stories, that demands the redemptive act, that demands that what falls at least be offered the chance to be restored.”
I view these stories as offerings, as a chance to see our own lives in stark realness, in all their rawness. Reading each of these series represents two of the most powerful reading experiences of my life. I have been irrevocably changed by them. I think you will be too.