Let's Get Serious

As we move into the second week of Lent, we’ve had about ten days to revisit what the season is all about. This is the time of year when we get serious about our spiritual life, about religious observance, and about our various self-improvement projects. What we might have missed in the various Lenten prayers is the use of words like “observance” and “discipline." From Ash Wednesday we prayed that, by our observance and by Lenten discipline, we might come to the celebration of the Easter mysteries.

We might be well to see what God is doing in our lives in this season of grace. What are we hearing in the scriptures? What are we seeing in the signs of the times, the events of our world? What are we learning about ourselves as we relate to God, to our neighbor, and to our world?

Observance has to do with the traditional practices of Lent. These are certain visual and sensate rituals or activities which have, in the history of the Church, allowed time and space for God to act in our lives. Most clearly in the scriptural readings of Ash Wednesday, we read about “prayer, fasting, and almsgiving." We listened as we were admonished to do these things not just to be seen, but to change and transform us within.

A Season of Grace
Lent is a season of grace. Grace is God’s presence and initiative in our lives. Often, in our culture, religion is focused on the person. In actuality faith is about God’s actions and invitations among us. Lent, from that perspective, is God’s renewal within us of the mystery of Jesus’ death and rising. Our participation is response to the initiatives of grace and preparation of ourselves to move through grace to God’s saving presence.

Our response and our preparation to continue the work of God within us is a human endeavor. As such, it requires a plan and a discipline as we carry out our Lenten observances. The temptation is twofold as we begin. One is to focus on ourselves and our apparent ability to save ourselves and bring ourselves to holiness. The second is somewhat of a head trip of good intentions and pious thoughts.

The first--temptation to self-centered piety--is remedied by prayerful waiting on God. While we wait on God, we read the scriptures, we engage in vocal prayer, we read a spiritual book. Then we are still and allow God’s grace to interact

within our human and personal experience. What is it that God is saying to me? To what is he inviting me?

In the long history of the Church, spirituality is incarnational. We belong to liturgical tradition. This context moves us away from the second temptation, where we are captured in a kind of gnosticism or belief that holiness results from abstracted truth and almost an elite sharing in the vision of God.

The Church in its piety and in its liturgy engages the whole person. Sacraments and sacramentals are human things: actions, words and rituals in which God shows himself to us. The Lenten practices of prayer, fasting, and almsgiving engage the whole human person: body, soul, spirit, and mind.

Dicipline
The challenge of Lent is to be engaged in its discipline. Discipline requires purpose, resolve, choices about definite actions with times and places. Discipline prepares the soil for God’s actions in our lives. That is precisely the challenge to us – to translate our pious thoughts and high purpose into human actions with words and rituals.

Prayer, for example, begins with God’s invitation, but our response needs choices of place, time, style, energy, and patience. Regularity and rhythm give form to our desire to pray.

Fasting is another example of fleshy prayer, where our emptiness physically signs and invites our emptying of selves before the presence of God. It is, however, God who will fill the void, not ourselves. Fasting also places us in solidarity with the human family, who suffer physical hunger and want but on another level hunger for God in their lives. We wait together for God to rescue us from our human predicament.

Almsgiving is another opportunity to translate our spiritual thoughts into mission and action. As God has loved us in Christ in our human need, so we manifest and empty ourselves for the poor and needy of our world.

The admonition of the scriptures in carrying out these works of piety is not to do it for ourselves or for praise from other people. These Lenten practices are preparation of ourselves and our Christian community to experience and receive the saving masteries of death to life in Christ. In our emptiness Christ will fill us with Easter joy and peace.

CDH