How To Lose Blog Readers in One Easy Step!

In the early Church, the main purpose of Lent was to prepare the ‘catechumen’, i.e., the newly converted Christian, for baptism which at that time was performed during the Paschal liturgy. But even when the Church rarely baptized adults and the institution of the catechumenate disappeared, the basic meaning of Lent remained the same.

For even though we are baptized, what we constantly lose and betray is precisely that which we received at Baptism. Therefore Easter is our return every year to our own baptism, whereas Lent is our preparation for that return—the slow and sustained effort to perform, at the end, our own ‘passage’ or ‘pascha’ into the new life in Christ.

If Lenten worship preserves even today its catechetical and baptismal character, it is not as ‘archeological’ remains of the past, but as something valid and essential for us. For each year Lent and Easter are, once again, the rediscovery and the recovery by us of what we were made through our own baptismal death and resurrection.

A journey, a pilgrimage! Yes, as we begin it, as we make the first step into the ‘bright sadness’ of Lent, we see—far, far away—the destination. It is the joy of Easter, it is the entrance into the glory of the Kingdom. And it is this vision, the foretaste of Easter, that makes Lent’s sadness bright and our Lenten effort a ‘spiritual spring’. The night may be dark and long, but all along the way a mysterious and radiant dawn seems to shine on the horizon. “Do not deprive us of our expectation, O Lover of man.’

Alexander Schmemann, Great Lent

Reflection – Well, I have discovered the sure-fire way to drive readers away from the blog: have a series of blog posts that are explicitly about Lent, in the 3^rd week of Lent! It’s a good thing I really don’t care too much about traffic and stats on the blog, since it’s been downright amusing to see how the numbers fell this week.

Ah yes… Lent... still Lent, is it? How much longer…? Oh. And you’re going to talk about it all week?.. Oh. Well, see you later.

Many people around this time (myself most assuredly included) hit the wall pretty hard right about now, particularly if one is truly trying to do some form of serious fast or mortification. And perhaps it is a point in Lent where we just don’t want to hear about it anymore!

But for those few of youse who are sticking around, it is good to renew and refresh the vision, isn’t it? Even if we find perseverance in Lent a strain, the vision of Lent should never leave us. It is mercy that carries us through the desert to the joy of the Paschal feast, not our own non-existent moral and spiritual perfection.

We carry within us the reality of Easter, of course. It is not that somehow we go into a period where Christ is no longer risen, where the kingdom has no longer dawned in us, where we are returned to some kind of pre-baptismal state. Of course not – Christ is risen, eternally glorious, and we carry his risen life in our redeemed flesh continually.

It is only this that empowers us to visit the dry and barren lands of our hearts, the places of temptation and failure, refusal and rebellion. The devastating reality that we have fled from the risen Christ and his joy into paths of our own making, and that the realities of Easter victory and shameful defeat, eternal light and life and crushing darkness and death, mercy and sin all co-exist within our mortal frames.

In Lent we do journey through this bleak landscape for a season, but it is not so as to collapse into shame and guilt and despondency. It is, rather, to meet Christ there. The victory of Jesus is absolute in the world, and there is nothing—no sin, no failure, no darkness, no horrific tragedy—that the risen Christ has not gone out to meet, in the world and in our hearts.

And so Lent is sad, but it is bright. Lent is dark, but light in dawning. Lent is dry, but there are subterranean springs flowing throughout its desert landscapes. Lent is hard, but the hardness is already being met by the tender love of God in Christ. He is risen, and Lent is bearing us into His resurrection. Let it do so, and let us not lose heart in the doing of it.

Lent Is Not a Season

The old life, the life of sin and pettiness, is not easily overcome and changed. The Gospel expects and requires from man an effort of which, in his present state, he is virtually incapable. We are challenged with a vision, a goal, a way of life that is so much above our possibilities!

For even the Apostles, when they heard their Master’s teaching, asked Him in despair: ‘but how is this possible?’ it is not easy, indeed to reject a petty ideal of life made up of daily cares, of search for material goods, security, and pleasure, for an ideal of life in which nothing short of perfection is the goal: ‘be ye perfect as your Father in heaven is perfect.’

This world through all its ‘media’ says: be happy, take it easy, follow the broad way. Christ in the Gospel says: choose the narrow way, fight and suffer, for this is the road to the only genuine happiness. And unless the Church helps, how can we make that awful choice, how can we repent and return to the glorious promise given us each year at Easter?

This is where the Great Lent comes in. This is the help extended to us by the Church, the school of repentance which alone will make it possible to receive Easter not as mere permission to eat, to drink, to relax, but indeed as the end of the ‘old’ in us, as our entrance into the ‘new’.

Alexander Schmemann, Great Lent

Reflection – It has been a very good week here in Bruno SK, at the St. Therese Institute of Faith and Mission… but it has been also a very full one, which leaves me somewhat short on brilliant inspiration this morning.

At the same time, I hate to let the blog lag too much. Schmemann here certainly does remind us of just what a very high standard of life the Gospel calls us to. We are made for heroism and totality; we would prefer to lapse into something much less. We are made to be saints of God; we would prefer comfort and compromise. We are made to die and rise with Christ; we would prefer some other path, thank you very much.

Well, that’s just our humanity and its broken voice in us. When we talk about Great Lent (or simply Lent, in our Catholic tradition), we are not talking so much about a season, a mere space of time marked by certain disciplines and prayers. We are not talking about a set of practices, vital as they are: fasting, almsgiving, praying.

It is not a season or a fast or anything we can do that is going to make the great difference for us, carrying us from the broad (and yet paradoxically narrow) path of human limitation and mediocrity to the narrow (and yet paradoxically liberating) way of the Gospel.

It is the Holy Spirit who does this in us, and Lent is nothing if it is not a means to open ourselves, dispose ourselves, for the action of the Spirit. This is the whole point of the matter. We eat less, go without, so as to feel the emptiness within that makes us cry out to be filled. We pray more, or better, so that this crying out is strong in us. We love, and in striving to love experience our frailty and weakness, so that our radical need for God may be made manifest.

It is all about the grace of God and coming into that grace. That is Easter in us – the coming into it is Lent. We are trying (or at least God asks us to try) to live a life that we cannot live. The tension and strain of that is normal, expected, unavoidable. Lent helps us to clarify this tension and direct it rightly. Easter is, as he says, not just lots of food and drink and a big party, but the resolution of that tension not by some brilliant insight or heroic action on our part, but in the coming of God to us. Christ is risen, and only in that resurrection do we come into the fullness of life for which he made us.

How Can We Love What We Do Not Know?

Indeed, we live as if He never came. This is the only real sin, the bottomless sadness and tragedy of our nominal Christianity. If we realize this, then we may understand what Easter is and why it needs and presupposes Lent. For we may then understand that the liturgical traditions of the Church, all its cycles and services, exist, first of all, in order to help us recover the vision and the taste of that new life which we so easily lose and betray, so that we may repent and return to it.

How can we love and desire something that we do not know? How can we put above everything else in our life something which we have not seen and enjoyed? In short: how can we seek a Kingdom of which we have no idea? It is the worship of the Church that was from the very beginning and still is our entrance into, our communion with, the new life of the Kingdom.

It is through her liturgical life that the Church reveals to us something of that which ‘the ear has not heard, the eye has not seen, and what has not yet entered the heart of man, but which God has prepared for those who love Him.’ And in the center of that liturgical life, as its heart and climax, as the sun whose rays penetrate everywhere, stands Pascha.

It is the door opened every year into the splendor of Christ’s Kingdom, the foretaste of the eternal joy that awaits us, the glory of the victory which already, although invisibly, fills the whole creation: ‘death is no more.’

Alexander Schmemann, Great Lent

Reflection – OK, back to Lent after yesterday’s beautiful feast day! Although really, it is all connected. ‘We live as if He never came’ – this is the deep reason for Lent and Easter, that somehow God can become incarnate in the womb of Mary, can live and move among us, suffer and die for us, rise and ascend in glory to save us, send His Spirit upon us to live within us… and it doesn’t necessarily seem to matter much to us.

There can be that terrible ‘response’, if it’s even worthy of being called that, to the whole panoply of the mysteries of the Christian faith, of the life of Jesus and all it means and is in the world. The response of… ‘well, that’s nice… I guess… (shrug…)’ Even if a nominal faith is maintained in some fashion, we can seem to be so fundamentally indifferent, sluggish, half-hearted about the whole affair, that it’s hard to see how ‘faith’ enters into the picture.

Of course not everyone is like that, and the worst thing in the world we can do is look at anyone else’s response besides our own. How much does the mystery of Christ set my heart on fire, transform my life so that it’s a sharing in His life in every regard? To what degree are my thoughts, my affections, my energies directed by and taken up into the life and love of Christ living in me by His Spirit? Those are the questions we are always invited to ask ourselves, and not just in Lent either. It is never about the virtues or failures of the other person, but always a call to examine our own consciences.

Because spiritual torpor, spiritual sluggishness is always a peril for us, the Church does send us these liturgical seasons to stir up something in us. It remains for the local church community to make the liturgies as outwardly beautiful as they are in their interior essence, but the reality is that to simply walk through the Lenten season as the Church lays it out for us, to take the readings and prayers and make them our own, and then do the same with Easter, to allow the Church in its liturgical life to shape and guide our own life—this is one powerful way to stir up love of God and a grateful, prayerful, adoring heart in ourselves. How can we love what we do not know? The liturgical life of the Church is not the only means by which we come to know the mystery of Christ and His kingdom, but it is one powerful way to do so.

In Lent the focus is shaking off this laziness, this torpor, this terrible spiritual heaviness that drags us down into indifference and coldness of heart towards God and neighbour. In Easter it is to behold the beauty of God, radiant in the risen Christ, and to confess our faith in his victory and life over death and defeat. But in both, the movement is the same, and so as we head into this second half of Lent, let us not lose heart but continue our discipline, so that the Lord can truly be incarnate in us more deeply, and our lives can more and more manifest His life in every regard.