Lent: Telling the Same Story

While the Church paused to celebrate St. Patrick’s Day during Lent, I took the time to think about the Irish and their proverbial ability to tell stories. I prayed through my life via the stories of St. Patrick’s Days past, and with that, the many people who punctuated my life.

I prayed and thought my way recalling the woman down the street who was the only one to call me “Murph” and continued to do so until the day we spoke on the phone about my “saying a few words” at her funeral. Known only to her as “Murph”, I had the chance to say good words at her memorial service.

Quick to mind was the St. Patrick’s Day when a young girl from my eighth grade class and I put on a Paddy’s Day piano concert for the good Sisters of our parish. I could only smile that the two of us presided in the “music room” of the convent while the dozen or so Sisters sat attentively in their “community room” listening graciously to these two amateur pianists.
From these Irish memories I got thinking about how we are our stories. We are the people, the families, the events, the holidays, and the Holy Days which fill our lives. I got marveling about how we share ourselves as we mature and go through life by exchanging our stories.

Autobiography or Fiction
As the years go on, the facts and details keep changing and getting richer. After awhile, we would be hard pressed as to the real facts of the event. Our social chatter, which keeps our lives together, is somewhere between autobiography and fiction. The facts are mightily clothed in feelings, laughter, tears, and convenient modification. In scripture class, we would call that the “accommodated sense.” The story accommodates to the story teller and to the listener. In the accommodation, both come closer togther.

Lenten Story Telling
We have names for this storytelling process during Lent. We call it reading the scriptures, preaching and listening to the Word. It comes in colors of

penitential purple and with feelings of being hungry and with doing works of charity. That’s how we as Church tell our story and the many stories which belong to believers within the community.

We talk about memorial, as we remember via words of thanksgiving and praise. We are invited to--and we invite--conversion of heart from others. The story is about the Paschal Mystery: the death and rising of the Lord. In the telling of the story, we become wonderfully part of the story again. We are our stories and the central story is Christ himself.

The Church has always told the same story. It is the story of conversion which we see in our catechumens – death-to-life, baptism through Eucharist. It is the story of our baptism into Christ when we moved from the depth of the water to rise to life on the other side of the font.

On Palm Sunday and on Good Friday, the Church reads the Passion of the Lord in its entirety. We wait to hear the conclusion of the story on Easter with resurrection. The story is ritually acted out on Holy Thursday with bread breaking and washing feet. The Cross is held up as a sign of victory on Good Friday. Then, at the Easter Vigil, the whole story of God’s love for us is told from creation through the prophets to our resurrection in Christ.

While the Lenten story is filled with human pathos and emotion, we discover the tremendous power of God’s love as he raises Christ from death to life. In the telling. the story becomes our story.

The liturgical story is nuanced and well footnoted with our Lents past. It’s about such simple things as not eating candy or drinking soda. It’s about not eating in between meals and not eating meat on Fridays. In these little deeds, we are embraced by a greater mystery. In our “little deaths” we discover through the years the Passion and Death of the Lord himself. At Easter we are taken into the joy and wonder of the victory of Christ over death. Tell the story in the weeks to come and listen and see the story of believers in the Church. Christ invites us to his story.

CDH