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Lent starts this Wednesday. Are you ready?
Prayer, Fasting, Almsgiving
It’s hard to believe, at least it is for me, that this Wednesday begins the season of Lent. It starts early this year, so we didn’t have a lot of time to kind of get back into the swing of things, so to speak. And I want to really get us thinking about the season of Lent, but particularly through the eyes of Lent being a time of prayer, fasting, and almsgiving.
Those are the three great themes of Lent, and it’s really what we should focus on. Prayer. In our American culture, I’ve said this before, but I really think we focus too much first on what we do, and not enough on who we are. And that plays out in so many different ways.
One way it plays out, for example, is that sometimes our, let’s say, political affiliation can become even more than our religious affiliation. Sometimes we can find ourselves racing to do this thing or that thing without first stopping to ask, “Is this what God wants me to do? Is this the way in which God wants me to serve Him, or not?”
That’s why I think one of the elements of Lent that is so important is, in fact, prayer. I said last week the priority is not love your neighbor as yourself and then love God, or love your neighbor as yourself to show that you love God, but rather to start with loving God, placing ourselves in the presence of God so that we might come to know better who we are and what we should be.
The challenge, I think, especially when it comes to prayer in terms of what I mentioned at the beginning, this contemplative prayer, is that when we spend time in silent prayer, when we just sit before God, that can be difficult to do. And I’ll tell you why it’s difficult for me. When I still my mind, or at least try to, when I sit before God in silence and quiet, I have to confront the fact that I’m not who I say I am.
The image I show to everybody else is one thing, but I know deep in my heart my own sinfulness, my own brokenness. I know that I don’t always react the way that I would like to when I’m in the presence of someone else, or I’m not always as generous as I should be, or there are some people I just don’t like, but it’s not just that I don’t like them. I don’t make any effort to get to know them or to understand them.
And when I’m just before God and it’s me and God, there’s nowhere to hide. Those things become clear to me. There’s a popular question as we move into Lent. It comes up, I don’t know, probably a lot. What are you doing for Lent? What are you giving up for Lent? But the reality is in my life that too often I choose something that isn’t really about my spiritual growth, it’s about whether or not I have willpower.
So I give up chocolate. Well, for God’s sakes, Lent is, well, technically 46 days, but Sundays don’t count, so it’s really 40, but nonetheless, if I can’t go without chocolate for 46 days, I’ve got a problem. Okay, my willpower should be enabling me to go without chocolate for 46 days. Or whatever the thing is I like, coffee, I don’t know, tea, wine.
I know my father quit smoking for every Lent. Then he would start again. I never understood that. You went 46 days and my father was a very heavy smoker. But do any of those things lead us to holiness?
Because we fast not so that we can show what we can do, but by sacrificing, by fasting, we allow God to do something in our hearts and in our lives. That’s the purpose of what we sacrifice. And the sacrifice might not just be just giving something up, it may also be taking something on.
Almsgiving. I’m selfish. I’m not like the widow in the temple who gives everything she has to live on for the poor. But I’m selfish not only in ways where it’s about giving money, I’m selfish sometimes in the very act of giving money. I think I’ve done everything I need to do if I’m generous by just giving a few dollars to the poor.
But do I get to know the poor? Do I get to know and understand what their life is like? I don’t mean necessarily a face-to-face encounter, although I admired my brother who I think is much holier than I. Now he’s also taller and a bit wider, but he used to invite the homeless into McDonald’s for a cup of coffee together. Now it made me nervous because sometimes the homeless deal with mental illness and things. That’s why I mentioned his size.
I’m not advocating that necessarily that’s wise and prudent for any of us. But he wanted to get to know the person he was helping. There are people who work with the poor, so even if we don’t have the opportunity to get to know the poor, maybe we can reach out to those people who know the poor to learn more about them, to learn who they are, what their life is like.
Prayer, fasting, almsgiving, those are the things that we look at for this season of Lent. I’d like to offer a few suggestions in terms of those areas that might be helpful. In terms of prayer, we’re going to bring back something that was true here on Friday mornings. I think it was once a month. We’re going to try once a week. We’re going to see how it goes.
But that’s adoration of the Blessed Sacrament on Fridays from 9 to noon. It’s right after daily Mass. It’s during the day. It’s light out so that that may not be a factor. But the idea is it’s an invitation to simply sit in the presence of God, to really see if we can come to know who it is that God calls us to be.
I mentioned the importance of silence, and maybe it is carving out a little bit of time in your day, each day, to just spend a little bit of time in silent prayer. Dominicans are active contemplatives. But as one Dominican provincial said, “Contemplative is the noun.” We are contemplatives who happen to be engaged in active ministry.
I can tell you a much more fitting description of what we actually are in terms of what we do is that often we are contemplatives some of the time, but active much of the time. And maybe, just maybe, think of something that could be helpful for somebody in need. It could be giving them something, and that’s wonderful, it’s great, and it’s tremendous.
But maybe it’s learning something about them. One of the things I like about Operation Rice Bowl, for example, is that if you go to the Operation Rice Bowl website, it teaches about circumstances and situations that people in the world who are poor face. Or I mentioned the PovertyUSA website, which teaches us about the poor and helps raise our awareness of who they are and what they need and what we can do.
Lent ultimately is about identifying the ways in which we need to know Jesus more fully, the ways in which we need to remove those aspects of our life that keep us from doing that, and discovering the generosity of proclaiming the good news to those who long to hear the voice of Jesus.
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