When I speak of the three time-honored spiritual practices of Lent – prayer, fasting, and almsgiving – in terms of creating a vacancy, it is important to know that we do so not out of a spirit of sour-faced, self-deprivation, denigration, or punishment. The traditional practices reflect the purpose of the season they are meant to support, and the purpose of Lent is life. The purpose of Lent is Easter. The point of these practices is not to punish the body but rather to nourish the soul. Here we must remember that the soul is not a “thing” that sits somewhere to the left of our small intestine but rather who we truly are in God as a result of the gratuitousness of God’s love. Soul is both the totality of who we are and the essence of who we are. We don’t have souls, we are souls. The trouble is, we don’t always live as though we know or believe this to be true. We fail to live the truth that we are. Soul is our innate, God-given connection to and union with the Divine who called us into being in an act and expression of extravagant love.
Within the context of a Lenten spiritual practice, vacancy connotes more than just an empty space. It is meant to communicate that in and through prayer we make room for God. In and through fasting we make room for our deepest hungers to speak and be heard. In and through almsgiving we make room in our self-preoccupation for the one who is in need. Vacancy is meant to invite us into an experience of poverty of spirit and from that poverty to redirect our lives toward those attitudes and actions that nourish the soul’s truest longings and honor the soul’s authentic raison d’être. We consciously create a vacancy for a little while so that over time the emptiness becomes a space of fertile ground where together with God we plant new thoughts, words, awarenesses, habits, and actions that nurture and enliven us and connect us more consciously and tangibly to one’s true self, others, creation, and God.
Like an expectant mother, to live consciously into the spirit of Lent is to be pregnant with the mystery of Easter. During Lent, to use Gerard Manley Hopkins’ evocative image, we let Christ “easter in us.” It is the pregnancy — the sheer amazement and joy of it as well as the stretching difficulty of it — that makes the birth so incredible, meaningful, and joyful. Let us be fully alive to the self-emptying movement at the heart of Lent so that we might be enlivened by the fullness of joy that is Easter.♦
╬ Dan