Lent has begun. The week in which Ash Wednesday falls is an unusual double-hitter for the average Catholic: a day of mandatory fast and abstinence (one of two in the Church calendar) followed within forty-eight hours by a day of mandatory abstinence (one of the eight still on the Church calendar in the United States).
Lent stretches before us. And this guy wants us to be happy?
Yes.
Now, it’s not just me. Jesus seems to suggest something similar. In the Gospel for Ash Wednesday, he counsels those who fast to wash their faces, comb their hair, and … well, look as though they’re not fasting. In the first reading for the Friday after Ash Wednesday—the next abstinence day—Isaiah answers the Israelites when they complains that God doesn’t seem to notice their fasting. Your fasting doesn’t reach heaven, says God, speaking through the prophet, because it’s marred by injustice: “carrying on your own pursuits, driving all your laborers” (Isa. 58:3-4). And you’re probably even more unbearable because you’re hungry.
Fasting—self-denial—is not just an end in itself. Fasting is supposed to get us to deny ourselves for others. Isaiah scores the kind of concern for another that means sharing one’s food with him, treating him as a brother.
To do that means loving one’s neighbor as oneself . . . one’s true self. As Pope St. John Paul II pointed out in his first encyclical, Redemptor Hominis, man is made for love and cannot really discover himself until he loves. “He remains a being that is incomprehensible for himself, his life is senseless, if love is not revealed to him, if he does not encounter love, if he does not experience it and make it his own” (10).
But the ability to discover the other requires him to get beyond himself. In that sense, fasting is very much an invitation, because the bodily and the sensory exert so direct an impact on us. (Just ask the person who’s given up chocolate or coffee for Lent on day 3 of 40.) Fasting, in that sense, is not an empty ritual. It forces us to confront the very real struggle to go beyond our egoism, ourselves—and yet that is what Lent is about.
So important is this theme that Isaiah picks it up again on the Saturday after Ash Wednesday. There he talks about keeping the Sabbath, but what he says applies to the whole life of prayer. If we think of prayer, going to Mass, or even observing Lent primarily as an “obligation,” a “duty” we must fulfill, we are not getting out of ourselves. We are not penetrating the inner truth of what these celebrations are about. They continue to seem to be “burdens” and “yokes”—and not particularly light or easy ones, as Jesus elsewhere suggests.
Sin makes us sad because sin cuts us off from others—from God, our fellow man, ourselves, creation—locking us in our self-constructed little worlds that aren’t big enough for two. And that kind of isolation should sadden us.
But the whole reason for Lent is not to dwell on sin, but to turn from sin. And turning from sin, from lack of communion, means turning toward love and communion. That should make us happy.
The essence of Lent is not to be the moping, depressed, self-centered drag lying in sackcloth and ashes. The essence of Lent is discovering through penance that this is not who we really are. We are made in God’s image and likeness for others; our self-centeredness is a marring, a disfigurement of that image and likeness. And the purpose of Lent is to take out the portrait that we are supposed to be of God in the world, discover where the canvas is torn, the paint cracked, the colors faded, and—through God’s grace—engage in the work of restoration.
Consider the Catholic doctrine of purgatory. The souls in purgatory suffer. They suffer because who they should be lies buried beneath layers of encrusted sin and imperfection that hide it. Stripping that off isn’t easy. But they are also happy because, first, they know that their life story will have a happy ending—beatitude—and second, in one sense, they already are what they are preparing to be: confirmed in grace.
Lent, in that sense, is something like a temporal purgatory. Yes, it hurts. But we accept the hurt because we know it’s the way to a better life—and those who are mature know a little pain is worth a great gain. The difference between the purgatory of Lent and eschatological purgatory is that in Lent, our works contribute to our salvation: we remain active agents of our purification. In purgatory, we must depend on the charity of others totally. In that sense, our penances in this world “count” more.
An old Reader’s Digest quip quoted a doctor who spent twenty minutes every morning doing exercises. His observation fits Lent: “Do you think I like it? No! But I know that this makes me healthier, this makes me a better and happier person. And that’s worth it.”
Let’s then set our perspectives at the start of Lent. This is not a season of forty days of strife, to be jettisoned Easter morning. It is a time of restoration, whose achievement is something we want to attain—for ourselves and others—on Easter and long beyond it. God made us to know, love, and serve him in this life and to be happy with him in the next. Happiness starts now.