What Is Lent

What is Lent? Ash Wednesday was a few days ago, and we know that it started the Lenten countdown toward Holy Week and Easter, but maybe some of us are not completely clear as to just why these weeks of preparation are there.

One opinion is that Lent mainly is a time to deprive yourself. You give up candy or smoking or desserts or heavy meals or . . . choose your favorite. Such sacrifices are good and they are definitely part of Lenten practice (hopefully they are not like New Year’s resolutions, since we usually break those).

A more severe version of Lenten deprivation was what gave birth to Mardi Gras, meaning literally Fat Tuesday. In contrast to tough Lent, which is to follow, eat all the fat you can, parade around in costume, go wild. The public usually does not recall that Mardi Gras has something to do with the quaint old practice of Lent. But that makes the question even sharper: what is it that they/we have forgotten about Lent and its penance?

Try this. What if we described Lent as a “Retreat”?

A Retreat, in Catholic and other religions, is a space of days taken to pray and to be with God. Often one goes to a retreat house for this. In St. Louis, for instance, there is a beautiful place called “White House”—the president has never been there, it is a different one—which has a stunning view of the Mississippi River. Jesuits have preached Retreats there every weekend and sometimes during the week for many decades. Sizeable groups of men or of women come and stay for two or three days to meditate, listen to talks, and to refresh their spiritual lives.

No, no, I do not mean that you should disappear for the five weeks of Lent to the nearest retreat house. But what about letting each Lenten day partake of certain retreat practices? For instance, what about setting aside a little time daily to let your insides settle down for a while, to create space within you to welcome God. Maybe set up a special place in your house or elsewhere just to pray. How about a picture or crucifix or maybe just a candle? Or just 10 minutes of silence?

And why not take some time to read in advance the Gospel from the upcoming Sunday Mass? Sit down, read it slowly, and let the scene described take place within the your mind and heart. This week you could ask Jesus how it felt to have the Spirit drive him into the desert, as described in the Gospel.

The point? Let the Lord’s loving deeds be the motivation for “giving up” things during Lent. You might begin to see that you are giving a gift of gratitude to God, rather than just “giving up” something you like. How does such a practice prepare us for Holy Week and for Easter? By doing exactly what Jesus does when he gives himself up to suffering and to death. He is returning a gift of love to the Father. Lent prepares us to witness this reality of our savior, the same one we take part in at every Mass when we receive Communion.

Maybe we could let ourselves be driven into the desert ourselves, and let the Holy Spirit guide us. That is the meaning of Lent.
 

In Exile

The Spirit drove Jesus out into the desert,
and he remained in the desert for forty days,
tempted by Satan.

The Internal Battle for Our Souls

Two contraries cannot co-exist inside the same subject. Aristotle wrote that and it seems to say the obvious, something can't be light and dark at the same time.

However, in terms of what's happening inside our souls it seems that contraries can indeed co-exist inside the same subject. At any given moment, inside us, we are a mixture of light and darkness, sincerity and hypocrisy, selflessness and selfishness, virtue and vice, grace and sin, saint and sinner. As Henri Nouwen used to say: We want to be great saints, but we also don't want to miss out on all the sensations that sinners experience. And so our lives aren't simple.

We live with both light and darkness side us and for long periods of time, it seems, contraries do co-exist inside us. Our souls are a battleground where selflessness and selfishness, virtue and sin, vie for dominance. But eventually one or the other will begin to dominate and work at weeding out the other. That's why John of the Cross picks up this philosophical axiom and uses it to teach a key lesson about coming to purity of heart and purity of intention in our lives. Because contraries cannot co-exist inside us, there's something vital we need to do. What?

We need to pray regularly. Contraries cannot co-exist in us so if we sustain genuine prayer in our lives eventually sincerity will weed out insincerity, selflessness will weed out selfishness, and grace will weed out sin. If we sustain genuine prayer we will never, long-term, fall into moral rationalization. If we sustain genuine prayer in our lives we will never grow so blind to our own sin that we will begin to have morally exempt areas in our lives. Being faithful to prayer will ensure that we will never, long-range, live double lives because what prayer brings into our lives, a genuine presence of God, will not peacefully co-exist with selfishness, sin, rationalization, self-delusion, and hypocrisy. Simply put, at some point in our lives, we will either stop praying or stop our bad behavior. We won't be able to live with both. Our biggest danger then is to stop praying.

And this advice is eminently practical: We cannot always control how we feel about things. We cannot always control how we will be tempted. And none of us has the strength to never fall into sin. Our incapacity to fully actualize ourselves morally leaves us always short of full sanctity. There are things beyond us.

But there is something that we can control, something beyond the wild horses of emotion and temptation. We are beset by many things, but we can willfully, deliberately, with discipline and resolve, show up regularly to pray. We can make private prayer a regular discipline in our lives. We can commit ourselves to the habit of private prayer. And, if we do that, irrespective of the fact that we will have to work through long periods of dryness and boredom, eventually what that prayer brings into our lives will weed out our bad habits, rationalization, and sins. Two contraries cannot co-exist inside the same subject. Eventually we will either stop praying or we will give up our sin and rationalization. Nobody can be praying genuinely on a regular basis and be blind to his or her own sinfulness.

Our task then is to sustain private prayer as a habit in our lives, even if we have neither the insight nor the courage to see and address all the double-standards and moral blind-spots in our lives. What comes into our lives through prayer, often more imperceptible than visible, will eventually weed out ("cauterize", in John of the Cross' words) both our sin and our rationalizations about it.

This is akin to what Ronald Knox once taught about the Eucharist. For him, the Eucharist is the singular, vital, sustaining ritual within Christian life. Why? Because Knox believed that, as Christians, we have never really lived up to what Christ asked of us. We have never really loved our enemies, turned the other cheek, blessed those who cursed us, lived fully just lives, or forgiven those who hurt us. But we have been, he submits, faithful to Christ in one major way: We have been faithful in celebrating the Eucharist, to that one command.

Just before he left us, Jesus gave us the Eucharist and asked us to continue celebrating it until he returned. For two thousand years, awaiting that return, we've been faithful in doing that, no matter how unfaithful we have been in other ways. We have continued to celebrate the Eucharist and, in the end, more than anything else, that has been the one thing that has called us back, again and again, to fidelity.

The habit of private prayer will do the same thing for us. Since two contraries cannot co-exist inside the same subject, eventually either we will stop praying or we will stop sinning and rationalizing. The greatest moral danger in our lives is that we stop praying!