Lent, repent! It’s a great mnemonic. “Lent” is derived from an old English word meaning “Springtime.” Spring is the time when, shaking off the dead cold of winter, nature returns to life. What Lent, then, should be about is shaking off what leads to death and taking up what leads to life.
It bears noting that Lent is not a six-week self-improvement course. It is a time when the Church, in all her members, seeks to become more profoundly what we already are: the Body of Christ fully alive and, in the power of the Spirit, extending this life to the world. One way to do this is by recommitting ourselves to practicing those life-giving spiritual disciplines set forth by the Lord in our Gospel today: prayer, fasting, and almsgiving.
There seems to me a correlation between these disciplines, which fundamentally constitute Christian spirituality, and those great gifts of God, known formally as “the theological virtues”- faith, hope, and love.
Prayer is essential for a Christian. It is your response in faith to God’s call. God calls you to share his divine life, the life of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Grace is nothing other than God’s sharing divine life with us. This life is a communion of persons fused together by love. This is why the Eucharist is the source and summit of the Christian life.
Prayer, too, whether corporate or personal, liturgical or spontaneous, is communication with God. “Without prayer,” observed Romano Guardini, “faith becomes weak and the religious life atrophies.”1 Over time, he noted, it’s difficult to “remain a Christian without praying.”2 What relationship can thrive or even survive without communication?
Prayer is the catalyst of faith. Prayer is to fasting what faith is to hope. Just as hope without faith is mere optimism, fasting without prayer is dieting. Almsgiving without prayer and fasting is humanitarianism. Humanitarianism is good as far as it goes. But it falls short of what Jesus teaches his disciples.
As love- agape in Greek and caritas in Latin- is the fruit of faith and hope, almsgiving, which is perhaps best described as self-giving service to those in need, is the realization of prayer and fasting. Caritas- self-giving love- is the essence of Trinitarian life. As the scripture reveals: Deus caritas est (“God is love”).3 To jump ahead to the beginning of the Triduum, that most lovely of Latin hymns begins- Ubi caritas et amor, Deus ibi est (“Where charity and love are, God is there”). But we have all of Lent to arrive at that point.
Caritas, or charity, is concern for the whole person, including her transcendent dimension. As Pope Benedict noted, besides material assistance, which charity bids us to give, what genuinely Christian service offers those in need is “refreshment and care for their souls, something which is often even more necessary than material support.”4
Since Lent is the time each year during which we prepare for the renewal of our baptismal promises at Easter, it bears noting that when you were baptized, by grace, you were plunged into the divine life of God. Recommitting to practicing the fundamental disciplines of Christian life during Lent is how your renewal does not amount to so many words that signify, that is, point to, nothing real.
Something similar can be said about receiving ashes on your forehead. Especially in light of our Gospel, it takes some audacity to be marked in this way. To be thus marked is not just to be reminded of your mortality. No fact is more mundane, more existential, more universal than death. To receive ashes is to identify as a penitent, one who seeks to be transformed by grace into the image of Christ. Ashes are a sign of hope.
So, as we begin Lent, a season dedicated to repentance, we must disabuse ourselves of the very un-Catholic and un-Christian notion that grace and effort are mutually exclusive. Of course, we need God’s grace to make our efforts fruitful. It is God who both begins and brings to completion his good work in and through you.5
It is true that the practice of spiritual discipline will not, in and of itself, bring you closer to Christ. To believe otherwise is to mistake means for ends. Only Christ can draw you closer to himself. What even your best efforts do is open you to God’s grace, clearing space for and attuning yourself to the Spirit.
As Christians, we live and learn by seeking to put into practice the teachings of Jesus. Experience is the best teacher. How else can you really verify the truth of what the Lord teaches? As the religion of the Incarnation, Christianity cannot remain a set of abstract ideas and ideals.
May your practice of these disciplines foster growth in virtues theological: faith, hope, and love. The end to which the Law is but the means, as Jesus demonstrated repeatedly in word and deed, is to love God with your entire being and to love your neighbor as you love yourself. Or given the often-convoluted way we relate to ourselves, to love your neighbor as Christ loves you.
The Greek word, metanoia, usually translated as “repent,” means to have a change of mind, a change of heart. In other words, to repent is to change, and to be changed is to be converted. For a Christian, this means being increasingly conformed to the image of Jesus Christ. Lent, repent!
1 Romano Guardini, The Art of Praying: The Principles and Methods of Christian Prayer (Manchester: Sophia Institute), 5.↩
2 The Art of Praying, 5-6.↩
3 Epistula Ioannes I 4:8.16.↩
4 Pope Benedict XVI. Encyclical Letter, God is Love [Deus Caritas Est], sec. 28b.↩
5 Philippians 1:6.↩
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