Let's Do Lent

The word went out on Ash Wednesday: Let’s do Lent. “Doing Lent” brings all kinds of ideas to mind. For some of the community, there are memories of Lents past, when we had to choose what “to give up,” or when we could eat meat or not, or when we could eat at all. This might have been the time to attend daily Mass throughout the season. Stations of the Cross were popular devotions in parishes.

Then came the Second Vatican Council with a different perspective on Christian life including Lenten penitential practices. As in all things, the liturgy was emphasized as the beginning of Lenten practices. The faithful were directed to the Sunday readings as a place to focus our prayers and other devotions. Reconciliation continued to be a recommended place to consider personal conversion. Immediately after the Council, Communal Penance Celebrations became well received. We were still told that we “celebrated” reconciliation, but one still needed to “do” penance.

The Sacrament of Penance continued to be the practice of Lent, but somewhere the long lines became less as the faithful waited for confession.

Lenten Rules
The Lenten rules, while remaining important to the season, were changed to allow more personal choices about style and suitability for “doing” penance. Only Ash Wednesday and Good Friday were named as days of fast and abstinence. These were days when the faithful would not eat meat and observe the fast of not eating between the three meals. Fridays of Lent would remain as a memorial to the Passion and Death of the Lord with abstinence from meat. All of the changes were infused with a sense of solidarity with the poor, the hungry, and the suffering. If physical fasting and abstaining were not possible, works of charity were given a new importance as a form of penance.

Believers and communities were given the option and the invitation to intensify their Christian life. The direction was to personalize the choices in our efforts to remedy the effects of sin and to

experience the life-giving death and rising of the Lord. As the rules lightened in one sense, most penitential practices seem to become optional.

In our Church with its liturgical tradition, there had been a long history of allowing the body, mind, and spirit to be a cohesive force in our experience of God and, in the case of Lent, in the reconciling action of God in our lives. Much of this tradition was traded in for “self-growth” and “self-improvement” projects. Rather than seeking solidarity with the suffering of Christ and with our brothers and sisters, the faithful focused on being the “best which they could be.” The older tradition offers a remedy and recovery of a spiritual Lenten tradition in our communities.

Renewed Penance
The scriptures and the tradition suggest three ways of how a community and individuals recognize their sinfulness and do penance. This Lent we might consider these ways: prayer, fasting, and almsgiving. These ways seek to heal the brokenness of our communities and of persons within the community. They seek to reconcile us to God, to ourselves, and to each other.

Prayer allows us to be open to the mystery of God which surrounds us. We open ourselves communally and personally to God touching our lives. Sunday and daily Mass are good options. It is God who draws us together and heals us.

Fasting is bodily prayer which joins our hearts, souls, and bodies in an awareness of our own emptiness and powerlessness. We rediscover that God is our energy and it is he who allows for the good in our lives. It’s more than the gym. It’s about interiority.

Almsgiving might be called “financial” prayer. We give our resources, our money, our security. That which is gift from God we return to him in the person of our poor, hungry, and suffering neighbor. We move from ourselves to the Body of Christ, to the community.

Consider doing Lent in a renewed way and allowing God to move in our lives.

CDH