What are you doing for Lent? by Sr Ann Catherine o.p.

Every year as Ash Wednesday approaches, many of us find ourselves participating in conversations about what we are doing for Lent, and perhaps feel a growing sense of unease as we realise, once again, how unprepared we are for the season. We know the theory: at this time of year the Church encourages us to be more fervent in prayer, fasting and almsgiving, in preparation for Easter. But we are unsure how to apply this theory in our own case. What should we give up? What should we take up? What should we do for Lent?

And behind these questions, sometimes there lurks a deeper anxiety about our motivations. Why am I doing anything for Lent? How is Lenten fasting different from the diets we might embark on around this time in any case, in a bid to shift a few post-Christmas pounds? Is extra time given to prayer really an excuse for self-indulgent introspection? Most fundamentally, is Lent just an opportunity for spiritual one-upmanship; thinking up the most hard core penances we can and then sticking to them with gritted teeth in order to prove, if only to ourselves, how strong we are?

But what if Lent isn’t about glorying in our strength, but about accepting our weakness? The fathers of the Church loved to talk about Lent using medical imagery, and there is an ancient hymn which refers to it as “this healing time”. It is a time in which we lay bare before the Lord the wounds our sins have caused us, so that he may restore us to wholeness.

Part of the point of our Lenten penances, then, is to help with the process of diagnosis. As we detach ourselves even a little from our dependence on created things, by eating and drinking less than usual, for instance, or by giving more generously to charity, we come to see that it is God on whom we depend. Deeper prayer may then bring to the surface of our mind destructive patterns of behaviour or attitude that need to be addressed, perhaps in confession, as well as gratitude for the times when we have stayed close to God. It is possible to be a spiritual hypochondriac, and one of the blessings of a spiritual stock-taking during Lent, again, especially if we are able to talk things through in confession or spiritual direction, can be a realisation that things aren’t as bad as we might have feared!

But the traditional Lenten practices are not only a diagnostic tool, they are also a prescription, designed to help in the healing process itself. Sin is not about breaking arbitrary rules, the “thou shalt nots” that many of our contemporaries believe form the bedrock of our faith. Sin is trying to be something other than who God made us to be, and he made us to be like him, made us in the image of his self-giving love. To be healed from sin, therefore, is to be enabled to love, and we learn to love by loving. Prayer, fasting and almsgiving are three different ways of loving, and so three different ways of coming to be the people God made us to be. In prayer, we open ourselves to God’s love for us and respond to it; fasting is a kind of acted prayer, in which we demonstrate our desire to put our love for God above our craving for bodily comforts; almsgiving, which, of course, can involve offering our time and friendship, as well as our money, to those in need, is obviously love in action. Just as with physical fitness, the more we exercise, the stronger we will be, so the more we practice acts of love, the more loving we will be.

And, just as with physical exercise, it is wise not to be over-ambitious at first in our training programme. If we have difficulty running for a bus, there’s little point in attempting a marathon. Which is why it’s all right for our Lenten penances to be small ones: giving up chocolate, going to one daily mass per week if we’re not in the habit of it, taking up something like the SVP’s Friend for Lent scheme, spending an hour a week visiting in the Hope Nursing Home.

Whatever you decide to do for Lent, have a holy, and a happy one!

Sr Ann