Ever since I first attended a church that followed the rhythms of the church year, I have become an avid devotee to that unique way of telling time—both in public worship and personal devotion. The regular cycles of feasting and fasting, celebrating and lamenting, and acting and waiting—all centered on the birth, life, death, and resurrection of Christ—have helped balance my own spiritual life and ensure that I too make room for both the highs and lows of human experience, my own and my neighbor’s.
Yet one of the difficulties I have found is making connections between what happens on Sundays during the church year and the rest of my Monday–Saturday existence. So a few years ag, I began making playlists for each liturgical season to serve as a soundtrack that would help reinsert me into the season’s story—even on a particularly mundane Tuesday afternoon. Blurring the line between sacred and secular, these lists have helped me enter into each season’s particular character and take on its particular call.
This year’s Lenten playlist is arranged to take the listener on the journey from the reminders of our mortality on Ash Wednesday, through the cries of “Hosanna!” on Palm Sunday, to the upper room and the foot of the cross, until we arrive at the seeming hopelessness of Holy Saturday with Christ in the tomb. Interspersed throughout the playlist are three Kyries (Kyrie eleison, meaning “Lord, have mercy”), the cry of a Lenten people in need of Christ’s redemption.
Listen to the Spotify playlist here.
