Et ne nos inducas in tentationem.
During my Protestant days, Easter seemed to be just the day that you dressed your nicest for church. It was not until Lent 2010–only my second Lent as a fully initiated Catholic–that I had ever actually looked forward to Easter. This was because I desperately wanted my penance to end. I chose to practice what some might call the older pattern of fasting and abstinence. This means fasting every day during Lent (two small meals that don’t exceed the size of the third), with total abstinence from meat on Ash Wednesday and every Friday and Saturday; on other days, partial abstinence from meat is required. I tell you this not to draw attention to my piety (sadly, it’s not worth your attention), but to establish a simple fact: I was hungry. All the time. And being hungry all the time meant that I couldn’t go on my morning runs, made concentrating at work more difficult, and turned every secretary’s bowl of social treats into a near occasion of sin. After a week or so of this, I was already longing for Easter and the relief it promised.
I reflected on that experience after reading Denys’s Ash Wednesday meditation, with its appropriate focus on the purgative cleansing that this season signifies. Penance during Lent seems to be the way that we submit to that purgative fire. Or rather, it is the way that we embrace it. We simply don’t get to the glorious promise of Easter until we have suffered, because the triumph of Easter was obtained only through Christ’s suffering. Indeed, His voluntary suffering. Fasting is difficult not only because constant
hunger taxes our bodies. Fasting is difficult because it requires us to voluntarily suffer; we must choose to be hungry. In Practice in Christianity, Søren Kierkegaard (writing under the pseudonym Anti-Climacus) argues that Christian suffering is Christian precisely because it’s avoidable. All who suffer because of Christ could quit their suffering by quitting Christ. But those who subject themselves to suffering subject themselves to Christ, who is our ultimate example of voluntarily suffering. With imitation in mind, Christians strangely fight the impulse to flee the burning house. Christians instead walk headlong into the blaze, hoping that their loved ones are somewhere nearby, consumed by flames.
But Christian suffering isn’t gratuitous. Christians also have hope that the fire is not the end. Penitential practices during Lent increase that hope. We voluntarily suffer for 40 days, but we see Easter on the calendar. We know that new life is there for us to obtain, but we have no power to draw that day any nearer. We must instead endure till it comes to us. Penitential suffering during Lent should cultivate in us a patient longing for new life, symbolically realized on Easter morning.
“Then Jesus was led up by the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted by the devil.” (Mt. 4:1) “If you are the son of God,” said the tempter, “command these stones to become loaves of bread.” (Mt. 4:3) Though “he was hungry,” Christ refused. Do you refuse? Or do you turn your stones into bread? Do you even have the courage to wander into the wilderness in the first place?
{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
Atticus,
This is good….just who are we?
From Fr Tab
“I am a gardener to weed
And dig about the heart;
To plant therein the pregnant seed,
And watch, with many a smart,
The stem and leaf and blossom rise,
Alternate to supply
The victims for the sacrifice,
And, for the fruit, to die. ”
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Jesus voluntarily dies on the cross for us — can we not voluntairly die to something of this world for him?
Lent should only bring us closer to the cross of Christ. By Easter we should recognize in our feelble efforts the absolute greatness of Jesus Christ and his holy love for each of us.
Read this post while a small pile of chocolate candies suggested that I either eat them or throw them away to eliminate the temptation. I learned that I have to leave them right where they are.