Published in CHURCH
Spring 1999, Volume 15, Number 1

AWAKE, O SLEEPER

arise from the dead, and Christ shall give you light. (Eph. 5:14)

A theology professor of mine once divulged that he had built himself the coffin he would one day be buried in. If my memory serves me correctly, I recall he kept it in a large walk-in closet where it served for the time being as a bureau for shirts and sweaters. His intention was neither to be morbid nor to encourage anxious preoccupation with death, but rather to jar himself awake to the reality of his life and to LIFE itself. For him, each morning was a reminder: I am going to die. Remember you are dust and to dust you shall return. Therefore, each new day posed him the question: how am I to live today that I might enjoy the embrace of grace forever?

It is true that for the Church, Lent is that time each year when we take a good, slow look, individually and as a community of faith, not only at our mortality but at those coffins in our closets which at this very moment hold the deadness in our lives. It is a time to reflect on and then root out the thoughts, words and deeds which deal death to ourselves and others. During Lent we are invited in a special way to be intentional about preventing, recognizing, resisting, or undoing anything that harms us, others, or the dream of God for humanity. We take inventory of what in our being, beliefs, and behavior cuts us and others off from genuine, kind, and healthy relationships; what in our family relationships damages ours or other person’s self-image and deepest hopes; what structures and systems in our communities, church, and world impede our path to compassion, peace, justice or joy?

The Movement of Lent

Unlike my teacher’s practice which moved from death to life, the movement of Lent is from life to death to new life. Let me explain. Effective as the awareness of one’s mortality is to bring about positive life change, for the Christian it is not the fear of death but the love of God that is most capable of evoking conversion, rearranging life priorities, enlarging our perceptions, and generating renewed faithfulness. The first reading from the book of Joel proclaimed on Ash Wednesday sets the tone for Lent: We are called like heliotropes—sun flowers—to turn from the darkness in our lives toward the light of Christ. But our motivation to re-turn is not because God is a punitive, mean, ‘getcha’ God but because God is “tender and merciful, slow to anger and rich in kindness” (Joel 2:13). It is awakening to the incomparable goodness of God, to the extravagance of God’s love, to the presence of God’s tenderness, and to the extent of God’s mercy that most fully brings about a change of heart and a recommitment to love kindly, act justly, and to walk humbly with our God. (Micah 6:8).

My professor’s spiritual discipline was to consider death in order to more fully appreciate life. The spiritual discipline of Lent, on the other hand, is first, to wake up to the surprise of living, and to God who is LIFE itself. Lent seeks to evoke in us an increased appreciation of the prodigality of God, greater mindfulness of the mindboggling gratuitousness of life, and the ‘Aha!’ of living, This realization in turn reveals our subtle and not so subtle courtship with death: the little and not so little lapses of conscience, the indirect and direct ways we take life for granted and brush off God; the frequency with which we stand silent in the face of unfairness or dishonesty; the ease with which we give into despair or apathy; the insistence on holding on to that which stifles, damages or diminishes ourselves or others.

The movement of Lent is from radical amazement to radical remorse to radical redemption to radical recommitment. A close encounter with the lavishness of God’s love exposes in us what is fake, petty, malicious, greedy, and misguided. The experience of God’s care does create in us constructive guilt and contrite hearts for all that we have done or failed to do that has debased life and enhanced death. But a Lenten spirituality doesn’t end there. It moves us to genuine full hearted joy, to deeper humility and truer, God-commanded self-love, to passionate unsentimental love of our neighbor, and to compassionate care for the little ones of this world who are so dear to the heart of God.

Immersed in God’s Grace

Lent then is a time not only to consider what deadens and destroys but more so to awaken to WHO and what revives and enlivens. Lent, after all, means “springtime.” It is that time when daylight lengthens and scatters the darkness, when winter gives way in us, in our relationships, our families, our community, and in the world. So we move through Lent acutely aware of the darkness, but believing in the light of Christ which no darkness can overcome.

Another way to say this is that the character of Lent is both baptismal and penitential. Each Lent catechumens prepare to celebrate at the Easter Vigil the sacraments of initiation: baptism, confirmation, and eucharist. What we expect of them is that they have “undergone a conversion in mind and in action and to have developed a sufficient acquaintance with Christian teaching as well as a spirit of faith and charity…[and] the intention to receive the sacraments of the Church” (RCIA, n. 120). Nothing less is or should be expected of us who are already Catholic. As we walk with them through Lent toward the saving mystery of Easter, we also are called to prepare to recommit ourselves to our baptismal promises (Do you know what you promised or what was promised on your behalf at your baptism?). In and through baptism we experience the unconditional love of God; we accept wholeheartedly God’s acceptance of us—freely, consciously and hopefully drowning in God’s wet grace anything and everything in us that denies God, contradicts life, or deals death; and we commit ourselves to respond to that graciousness by fully, actively and joyfully embodying the love and vision of Jesus.

The exhortation used most often these days for the distribution of the ashes on Ash Wednesday: Turn away from sin and be faithful to the Gospel, expresses well the Lenten movement of conversion. For it is the Good News that first causes us to turn away from that which harms, desecrates, and deadens and to turn toward that which honors, rejuvenates, rejoices, and sings. We love because God first loved us (1 John 4:10,19). The news of Lent is not that we are worthless, but that God is indescribably delicious and deems us worth saving. The good news of Lent is that those who experience much forgiveness, love much (Lk. 7:43).

The Mystery of Our Faith

The Lenten ashes themselves applied to our foreheads vividly symbolize the essential mystery of our faith: in and through death comes new life. Before the days of recycling, it was an old Italian custom at the end of each winter, to do a thorough spring cleaning, then to gather the junk into a pile at the center of the village and burn it. When we collect the ashes from the previous year’s palms we do something similar: we get rid of the junk that clutters our lives and prevents us from experiencing life more fully. Yes, we wear the ashes as a sign of our human mortality, as a mark of our sorrow, and as a sign of our intention to turn like the heliotrope toward the light of Christ.

But it is important that we not overlook the obvious: the ashes are not merely smudged on our foreheads but traced “indelibly” on us in the form of a cross. For Christians, the cross which was historically the place of execution becomes through faith the sign of new and eternal life. Christ has died; Christ is risen; Christ will come again. So on Holy Thursday we sing of the glory of the cross: We should glory in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, for he is our salvation, our life and our resurrection; through him we are saved and made free (Gal. 6:14). Ashes in the form of a cross announce loud and clear: God’s grace defeats human sin. LIFE, not death, is the final word.

Lenten Habits of the Heart

As a tangible way of living out the call to conversion, the Church suggests three specific spiritual disciplines: prayer, fasting, and almsgiving (sharing). As the image of the townspeople burning their gathered junk suggests, Lent is a season of subtraction and of making space. Through prayer we create a vacancy reserved for God, where only God can dwell; by fasting we intentionally create a hunger that reminds us of the need only God can fill; in almsgiving we help re-create a world where all can live justly and well. Abraham Heschel wrote, “A good person is not [one] who does the right thing, but [one] who is in the habit of doing the right thing.” This three-fold, time-tested discipline is for the purpose of forming “habits of the heart” so that they might “easter in us,” becoming such a part of us that we live them out spontaneously each day.

These actions are not meant as self-punishments; nor are they sacrifices in the narrow sense in which we so often couch them. They are rather a foretaste of the Easter reality. Gertrude Mueller Nelson explains: “Prayer is not meant as a detachment from the world, but is an integration of the Gospel message with our human experience. Self-denial is completed beyond the self in its reinvestment of service and ministry to others. Almsgiving is not just a monetary paying off of our guilty conscience but a challenge to love our neighbor with unselfish concern.”

The purpose of Lent is not only to create in us clean hearts, but thirsty hearts anxious to drink deeply of the saving Waters of Life, hungry hearts yearning to be fed by the Bread of Life and to feed others, and new hearts not made of stone but of the same loving flesh God took on in Jesus. So let us Lent well! In doing so, Christ will easter in us and in our world.

~ DANIEL J. MILLER, Ph.D. © 1999.