Lent
2002
I
once called Advent “a season for penance with a little sugar sprinkled on
top.” If that is true, then Lent is a season of penance with no sugar coating!
It is pure penance, and a most serious call to conversion. It is bran cereal in
the morning with no sweetener whatsoever! It is an intense refocusing on the
spiritual realities of life and death, and making the proper adjustments in our
own life. It is no time for fooling around, but literally about spiritual life
or death.
Lent
is the time for repentance and conversion in a more intentional and intensive
way than usual. Repentance, penance, and conversion all mean to simply “turn
around.” It is like someone walking towards a cliff with a blindfold on. Lent
helps us to take off the blindfold, see the serous danger of the current
direction of our life, and to turn back towards God. God brings life. Satan and
his angels bring death. One leads towards the cliff, the other leads away from
it.
Though
embraced more intensely for a particular time, conversion is a daily process.
Jesus says, “ No one can be my disciple unless he take up his cross
daily, and follow me.” As the Rule of St. Benedict says, “ The life of the
monk is a perpetual Lent.” But Jesus went to the desert for forty days, and
St. Benedict makes provision for Lent in his monastery.
During
Lent we also make the journey from changed external environment or practices, to
great testing of our interior resolve to persevere, to a final death to self
through the Lenten disciplines we embrace. Jesus is our model.
Lent
is a forty-day period before Easter that symbolizes Christ’s sojourn in the
desert to fast, pray, and be tempted by the devil, to prepare him for a life of
ministry. That ministry led him to the Cross, and only after the Cross was he
resurrected. Likewise for those of us who follow him, it comes no other way.
Lent is a time to intentionally rediscover this reality.
Every
other major religion has their own experience of the process of dying to the
old, and rising up a new person. This is done through the embracing of a life of
interior and exterior discipline in order to subdue the patterns of the old
illusory self, and to rediscover our original self. Buddhists call this
rediscovering the face you were born with. Taoists call it becoming like a
newborn baby again. Christians call it being born again. The Buddhists call this
death to the old “the great death.” We call it embracing the Cross.
Most
religions have some teaching about faith and morality, and then a jump to the
mystical through a death to the old, and a rising to the new. It is called
different names by various faiths, but the core reality is much the same.
Other
major religions have a similar period for fasting, prayer, and more intense
living of the tenants of their particular faith. Islam has Ramadan, during which
every serious Moslem undertakes fasting and prayer. Zen Buddhism has a one week
Sesshin, the high point of the monastic training, which is a most intensive
practice of meditation, to the exclusion of any unnecessary, and the minimizing
of any strictly necessary, daily monastic chores. For monks, they also have a
three-month meditation season, originating from the impossibility for itinerant
mendicant traveling during the harsh Indian monsoon season. By and large, these
other expressions enjoy a great respect of this more intense period by
practitioners of, and outsiders to, their particular expression of faith.
What
is unfortunate is that out of these mentioned the non-Christian discipline is
often seen as taken more seriously by many and most. The rank and file Moslem
takes Ramadan most seriously; as does the Zen practitioner take Sesshin. Of
course, any with even a subtle anti Christian bias is predisposed to such
criticisms. But some of these criticisms are valid.
If
anyone were to take this kind of spiritual period seriously it should those of
us who follow the ONE who IS the way, the truth, and the life.
But it must be admitted that we Christians often slide through Lent as
mere archaic interruption to our normal modern lives of self-indulgence, and
pride. Out of these flow the vices contrary to the Evangelical Counsels of
Obedience, Poverty, and Chastity, in individualism, consumerism, and
promiscuity, just to name three. Lent is a great time to meditate on these
counsels to virtue, and their corresponding opposite vices in our daily life, as
well as on all virtue and vice.
Ultimately,
Lent is simply about letting go of the old self-centered self, and rising up to
a new selfless person in Christ through an extraordinary embrace of traditional
exterior and interior disciplines of the Spirit. It is about becoming bodily,
emotionally, mentally, and spiritually sensitized through a more intensive
temporary discipline to the things of Jesus and the gospel that can really
become a part of our daily life in Christ.
How
do we, as Brothers and Sisters of Charity, embrace our Lenten observance? Are we
among the few, who are truly respected for a life of voluntary extra ordinary
conversion and penance that bring new life to all through Christ, or are we seen
among the many Catholic and non Catholic Christians who simply go through the
motions like the living dead with as little as we can get by with? One brings
life, and one brings death. One brings a whole new way of living, and the other
brings a mere continuation of the walking death of humanity without healthy
spirituality in God through Christ.
The
choice is up to us. The choice is daily, but is magnified and intensified
through this annual Lenten season of conversion. But it is really nothing more,
or less, than a call to daily conversion and penance that change every day of
our life for the better through Jesus Christ in God.
What is our choice today?
I
pray God’s blessing on all of you who take this season seriously. May you all
make a good Lent that leads to the resurrection of Easter. May you be blessed
with the Charity of God through Christ our Lord.
John
Michael Talbot
Founder
and General Minister,
The Brothers and sister of Charity at Little Portion