The Feast of Lent
It was St. Augustine, long before Sigmund Freud, who perceived that human sin is a consequence of disordered and misdirected loving. The remedy was not ceasing to love — to do that would be to become a block of wood, emotionally dead — but to set our love in its proper order. And that order is defined most clearly by the two great commandments that Jesus gave: to love God — who is perfect love — with all our heart, and with all our soul, and with all our mind; and to love our neighbors as ourselves (Matthew 22:37-39).
Yet, this proper ordering of love is not something we can do in our own strength. Only by Grace — the reaching out to us of an enabling Love in which we are loved before we are even capable of loving; a Love which loves us as we are and for what we may yet become — may we be so ordered.
It is in the context of that Grace and Love, seen in the Cross of Christ to which Lent leads, that repentance and fasting and self-denial find their meaning. It is by Grace that we are saved. When we know that, we find that the ascetic disciplines of the spiritual life are not negative, but are simply ways to train and develop the spirit. We deceive ourselves if we deny that training and practice are needed as much by those who would grow in the love of God, as by those who would become skilled in sport or music. No one realistically believes that they can play golf with skill and success without practicing, but many seem to think that they can be Christian with no effort at all. Thus, Lent is indeed a springtime, as the old English root of the word (lengthening days) reminds us, not only because Lent and spring coincide, but because the discipline of Lent is about that penitence which subverts pride and easy optimism, and enables the flowering of the fruits of the spirit.
This flowering of the fruits of the spirit empowers us to say, “No” to temptations — refusing to go along with the destructive, the evil, the wasteful; refusing to be bitter; refusing to put others down; refusing not to forgive. And to say, “Yes” to whatever is honorable, whatever is just, pure, lovely, gracious and excellent. In so doing, we are creatures who become more like our Creator and the world becomes a better place. It is in learning this that we discover the paradoxical truth in George Herbert’s Ash Wednesday greeting of penitence and fasting — Welcome, dear feast of Lent.
