Lent: a time of increasing hope — despite everything
Fr. David wrote this description of our entry into this penitential season in 1993.
MH Combermere eases into Lent like a freight train gathering slow momentum: inchingly at first, but with an inevitable thrust that is hard to stop once things start rolling. Our music shifts into a Lenten mode. Every morning we begin lauds with a moving, somber Byzantine hymn: Open to me the doors of repentance.
Later, we prostrate ourselves several times while praying the prayer of St. Ephrem: “O Lord, Master of my life, grant that I may not be infected with the spirit of slothfulness and faintheartedness, with the spirit of ambition and vain talking.
“Grant instead to me, your servant, a spirit of purity and humility, a spirit of patience and love.”
Above all, the prayer then asks that we receive the grace to be aware of our own sins and not to judge those of our brothers and sisters in the community.
The sum-total of these prayers, daily liturgies and spiritual readings, efforts at fasting (including putting away that favorite, popcorn) is that we find ourselves soaked…drenched…saturated in a Lenten atmosphere. Lent is a soul-baring time of the year. Not to one another so much, but to ourselves, by God’s grace.
This is not a comfortable experience. Do I have a secret cache of rebellion hidden somewhere in my heart? Lent, properly adhered to, exposes it. Deep down, do I judge — even detest — this or that about this one or that one? The pitiless sun of the Lenten spring melts the protective coating of frosty politeness and the frozen smile.
Are there sinister clouds of despair, perversion, rage, or unbelief lurking within me? They, too, will make an appearance, even before the ashes of Wednesday morning have had the chance to penetrate my brain with their compelling message of imminent mortality.
The demons have a field day, too. These oh-so-personal intelligences play upon our wounds and sinful tendencies, magnifying some and aggravating others. They do everything to make sin seem inevitable and failure our destiny. Small upsets become cosmic incidents. Shaky relationships get positively explosive. Communications get muddled and confused.
This year we bear the added burden of some tragic deaths among our relatives and friends. This has brought home to us the life-and-death battle that rages on so many fronts today, from the international to the intimately personal.
On the surface, there seems no guarantee that Life is going to win out. Experience indicates things can go either way. All the same, we are singing brightly another Lenten song, as bright as a March sun careening off the melting snow in a thousand jubilant directions:
The Lenten Spring has come! The light of repentance!
Lent: a time of increasing daylight, at least in these northern latitudes. Lent: a time of increasing hope — despite everything — in any place where faith holds sway.
Our merciful Savior embraces to the core the very poverty and ugliness he has chosen to expose. This is for our healing, our salvation.
Let us run to him this year, even as the crowds ran eagerly to welcome his entry into Jerusalem. Let us welcome him, as did the woman at the well, so tortured in her soul with an awful thirst for love.
This is a time, a year, of a very awful thirst. But our Savior is greater still in the scope of his love for us and his power to save. His promise still rings as true as ever: Whoever drinks the water I shall give will never be thirsty again. The water that I shall give will turn into a spring inside him, welling up to eternal life (Jn 4:13-14).
Let us be wise and drink deeply of the waters of his mercy.
Artwork by ©Carolyn Desch, Madonna House
