Feb. 21, 2007
Joel 2: 12-18
2 Cor 5: 20—6: 2
Matt 6: 1-6, 16-18
Holy Cross, Champaign, Ill.
St. Paul advises us today,
“Now is a very acceptable time; now is the day of salvation” (2 Cor 6:2). A time acceptable for what? A day to be saved from what? The prophet Joel gives a partial answer: “Rend your hearts…, and return to the Lord,
your God” (2:13). Then the prophet
speaks of national ailments: the Lord’s
heritage is a reproach (2:17) and the Lord is stirred to concern for his land
(2:18)—the national ailments being the consequences of the people’s hearts
having become proud or hard or self-centered, separated from God.
Before we think of
national ailments, tho, we have to examine our own hearts, our own lives. Paul’s words, “We implore you on behalf of
Christ, be reconciled to God” (2 Cor 5:20), are addressed to us as individual
sinners. “Now is a very acceptable
time.” Now is a season of grace given to
us by God, to be converted anew to him thru his Son Jesus Christ.
As you know, the
catechumens of our parish and of the whole Church are in their final weeks of
preparation for taking the plunge into the death and resurrection of
Jesus. I suppose some of them somewhere
will literally plunge into the waters of Baptism, so fully symbolizing the life
of grace they’ll enter—even if here, as in most parishes, we use the more timid
but still graced sign of pouring the water over their heads.
But Lent is a season of
preparation for us, as well. All of us
will renew our baptismal promises at the Easter Vigil or on Easter Sunday. We will be renewing our commitment to Jesus
Christ and to the conversion of our lives from sin to discipleship, from death
to life. The ashes that will mark our
foreheads in a few minutes are the outward sign of our desire to be so committed. If we are not willing to commit our lives to
Jesus, then the ashes are just an empty show.
In today’s gospel, Jesus
suggests to us 3 ways to do this prep work:
almsgiving, prayer, and fasting.
Those are 3 ways to work on our conversion; 3 ways to give God the room
in our hearts to give them a good spring cleaning, make them over, make them
new.
On the subject of our
hearts, I want to share with you part of what a dear young friend of mine,
named Paula, blogged yesterday:
“If only
there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were
necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But
the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And
who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?”
—The
Gulag Archipelago by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
I came across this quote recently and
was struck by how it calls out our tendency to play the blame game: to
point a fault-finding finger at others rather than at ourselves. But its
insights go further, because it reminds us that there is both good and evil in
every human heart and it challenges us to destroy—I like the definitiveness of
that word choice—whatever evil is within us.
The
season of Lent is an ideal time to acknowledge the good and the evil in my own
heart. I want to identify what is good in me and then work to refine and
enhance those virtues. I also want to pinpoint exactly what is corrupt and
cruel in me and get rid of it completely.
Is
this a spiritual exercise that can be wrapped up in forty days? I don’t think
so! But, actually, that’s the point: by dedicating the Lenten period to a
serious self-examination and a commitment to self- improvement I can use it to
kickstart the building up of lifelong habits. And it’s all the more likely
to succeed if I begin by taking small but specific, doable steps in the right
direction.
So, I have singled out one virtue and
one vice in me. Every day of Lent I will do two concrete actions: one
which strengthens the virtue and one which weeds out the vice.
Building
up life-long habits is precisely the topic of a chapter that I just read in the
book that the parish offered as a Christmas gift to every family, Matthew
Kelly’s Resisting Happiness. Go back to ch. 21 and re-read that. Or jump ahead and read it.
Paula
continues her post by seeing a link between whatever she does and the total
evil or total virtue in the world:
“each time I choose virtue I increase the good in our world and
each time I choose vice I add to the evil in our world.” She pledges, then, to remember how that evil
or that good affects the world, and so affects the people she loves: “every step I take towards virtue or towards
vice affects your life in some way.”
So she pledges to remember those whom she loves when she’s tempted
toward evil or is feeling slothful about doing virtue.
Paula
might be suggesting a good Lenten program for us regarding our own hearts, our
own evil and virtue, the people we love, the world we want to be a wee bit
better for those we love—and our relationship with our Lord Jesus Christ, who
loves us and saves us.
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