I have always loved a good journey. I like planning trips and figuring out the best way from point A to point B. While GPS mostly does that work these days, I do love looking things up on a map, to include side quests for the best donuts in Massachusetts, an off -the-wall museum or a special exhibit.
Even the word “journey” appeals to me. A journey is better than a trip. It’s an adventure, but a playful adventure. It involves anticipation and suspense, but there’s a structure to it. There are reservations. Plans. Lately it seems like others have taken up my fondness for the word. Everything is a journey now. I just finished the college search journey with my child. I get advertisements for a retirement journey, weight loss journeys, fitness journeys and more.
Despite the overuse of the word journey, I still looked forward to the annual Lenten journey. I regularly created worship materials based on that theme. It was such an obvious metaphor in my mind. We start at Ash Wednesday and keep working through until we reach Palm Sunday, Holy Week, and finally, the ultimate destination, Easter Sunday.
In February 2023, that all changed.
Early one morning, I received word that my sister and niece were involved in a car accident. An intoxicated driver, traveling on the wrong side of a divided highway, had struck their car. My sister was badly injured. My 23-year-old niece—brilliant, beautiful, kind and quirky—was killed instantly.
Nine days later, I rubbed chalky ash onto the foreheads of my parishioners. “Remember you are dust and to dust you will return,” I said.
To manage both the medical and geographic logistics, Beth’s memorial was postponed until the Sunday after Easter. All of us spent Lent in a period of jello- thick suspended grief.
Lent and grief will probably never dis-entangle for me.
After Beth died, while my sister healed, while Lent marched forward, I started walking. I didn’t plan it. I just did it. Actually … walking sounds too organized and athletic for what I did. I didn’t walk. I meandered.
It was New England March, raw and muddy, cloaked in every shade of brown and grey. My breath hung in cotton-ball puffs in the air. Forgotten mittens left my hands red and worried. March is not New England’s best season. The snow is gone. The flowers are months away. Sensible people stay inside.
I meandered. I was slow, purposeless, dull. I just went nowhere and everywhere.
I walked when I could— before work, during lunch, after work. It didn’t matter. Every day, I put my salt-caked boots on the slushy sidewalk and walked to nowhere.
All I remember of that Lent was walking, heading nowhere. I slogged through worship. Other than that, I just walked. All other Lenten observances fell to the wayside. Easter came as a surprise. The joy of it, even more so.
Someone told me that walking was clearly a metaphor for the grief journey. I don’t believe that though. I don’t think there is a grief journey. A journey implies organization and planning. A journey implies a beginning, a middle and an end. It implies something purposeful. I couldn’t do that.
There was, however, a grief meander. Lent is much the same.
While my initial season of purposeless walking was born out of necessity, I now commit myself annually to a holy Lenten meander. I read scripture in no purposeful order.
I read parts of books. Sometimes I walk; sometimes I don’t. My Lent is purposeless yet brimming with purpose. I spend my time just observing. I fast from planning.
Our lives are so swift. There is such pressure to always be progressing, improving, striving. Every product made and advertised seems to offer us a way to do life better, faster, smarter. We shave bits of time from every endeavor, so we can fit more things into the 24 hours we have. Life is so fast, too fast. If the goal of Lent is to deepen our relationships with Christ through prayer, fasting and service, maybe many of us would benefit from not pressuring this goal with too many requirements. Maybe Lent doesn’t need to be a Girl Scout badge. Maybe Lent needs to just be. Maybe we can’t do Lent any faster, any better, any smarter, because nothing we do will make the resurrection any more or less wondrous.
The Lent after Beth died, I let myself believe that all God expected of me was to put one foot in front of the other, even if it meant going nowhere. That was the year I found out that I could become totally lost 6 blocks from home but never be alone. That was the year I learned that Lent doesn’t have to be a journey. It can be a walkabout, a wander, a meander. I learned then, and continue to learn now, that all paths—purposeful or not—lead to the glory of Easter morning.
The Rev. Susan K. Olson is a teaching elder (pastor) in the Presbyterian Church USA. She currently serves as part-time pastor for the First Congregational Church of Lyme, Lyme, Connecticut, while working full time in disability services at Yale University. Susan lives in New Haven, Connecticut, with her daughter and two poorly behaved but beloved cats.
This excerpted article appears in the March/April/May 2026 issue of Gather. To read more like it, subscribe to Gather.