Dianne Garcia reflects on what it means to celebrate Lent, even while being oppressed and experiencing injustice, in addition to offering Lenten challenges to those who experience privilege.
This post is in observance of Ash Wednesday, the beginning of the Lenten season.
Dianne Garcia is the pastor of the Iglesia Cristiana Roca de Refugio in San Antonio, Texas, a church centered in the immigrant community and focused on creating a place of belonging through God’s love for those that have been told they don’t belong. Iglesia Cristiana Roca de Refugio is affiliated with Mountain States Mennonite Conference.
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I recently heard the origins of Liberation Theology described as the result of Latin American Catholic priests navigating the space between their theological belief that we are all abundantly loved by God and the unrelenting suffering experienced by the poor to whom they were ministering.[1] As the pastor of a church made up of immigrant families, who is accompanying my congregation through a time in which they are surrounded by people telling them that they do not belong and that their suffering does not matter, I understand the difficulty in bridging that gap.
How do I talk to the people in my community — who feel rejected, diminished and attacked, who are afraid each time there is a knock on the door, who have lost their jobs, who are being kicked out of closing shelters and left on the street with their babies in their arms — about God’s infinite grace?
The question feels even more pressing as we enter Lent, the season of repentance, on the heels of the inauguration of one of the most overtly racist and anti-immigrant presidents in the recent history of our country. How do I talk about fasting to people who are already starving? How do I talk about almsgiving to a congregation in which people are sleeping in cars or squatting in empty apartments, sleeping on floors with no heat? How do I talk about repentance to a community that faces stifling dehumanization and oppression daily?
Howard Thurman writes in “Jesus and the Disinherited” that “the basic fact is that Christianity as it was born in the mind of this Jewish thinker and teacher appears as a technique of survival for the oppressed. That it became, through the intervening years, a religion of the powerful and the dominant, used sometimes as an instrument of oppression, must not tempt us into believing it was thus in the mind and life of Jesus.”[2]
Jesus understood oppression, and he was ministering to an oppressed people. As Christians living multiple millennia after the birth and death of Jesus, I believe that we must shoulder the burden of disentangling which practices of our faith are aligned with the way of Jesus and which are actually more representative of what somebody — who was often white and male — many years later, and living in a completely different context, thought that we should do.
But we cannot assume out-of-hand that fasting or almsgiving or repentance do not apply to those of us that are currently on the wrong side of justice. As a side note: Those of us that are on the side of privilege and power certainly also have to question our own desire to so often twist our way out of those mandates to unburden ourselves, because they were definitely meant for us.
However we view the specific traditions of Lent, the overarching message of Jesus was that we need to pull ourselves out of the small story of humanity and constantly resituate ourselves in the larger story of God. Therefore that should be the outcome of whatever practices of faith we adhere to. Jesus was always pointing us away from the things that trap us inside ourselves and pointing us toward grace.
Being a part of the bigger story is something that we can all do from wherever we are, regardless of our background or current experience. The bigger story has nothing to do with the ways we normally define “having a better life.” It is, instead, leading us into a more meaningful, more beautiful and more awe-filled life — a life that is full of God.
The bigger story for those of us who are oppressed is not that we might one day have worldly power or wealth. The bigger story for my community is that fear, dehumanization and hatred do not define us.
The bigger story for those of us steeped in privilege is that deep vulnerability, abundant generosity and life-transforming hospitality are far more powerful than the power that we already have and that the life of grace that they usher in is worth the discomfort and uncertainty of letting go.
Stepping into the bigger story feels like a truer framing for Lent and one that I can offer faithfully to my church in this time of worldly tumult and heartbreak. May we all find ourselves and one another in that story, together, in these weeks of waiting.
[1]From the Faith and Life Forum 2025, organized by the Mountain States Mennonite Conference, with speaker Shannon Dycus, https://www.youtube.com/live/JSQ8uLPJBzE.
[2] Howard Thurman, “Jesus and the Disinherited,” p. 18.
The views and opinions expressed in this blog belong to the author and are not intended to represent the views of the MC USA Executive Board or staff.
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