I asked my friend and current pastor at Christ Episcopal Church in Sheridan, Montana to write something in anticipation of the fast arriving Lenten season - Ash Wednesday is less than two weeks off. Bruce is a very thoughtful and pastoral (i.e. caring) person. For those interested in thinking a bit about preparing yourselves for Lent, I commend this piece.
Ash
Wednesday comes once a year, just like every other holy day in the church
calendar. The first day of Lent, however, usually feels more like Tax Day than Christmas
because it opens the season when Christians are meant to get serious about
dealing with the power of sin in our lives—and who enjoys doing that? We’re
more comfortable identifying our neighbors’ moral flaws than our own. Ash
Wednesday is the traditional time for us to undertake an annual examination of
conscience, something AA calls a “fearless moral inventory,” a thoughtful gaze
into the mirror of personal objectivity as we study the aspects of our life that
need to be amended. But an examination of conscience only works if we know what
we should be looking for and how to deal with it when we find it.
We
might consider our Ash Wednesday discipline as comparable to a periodic medical
examination. I spent years of my young life outdoors in the sun and was over
fifty before I learned that I’m susceptible to skin-cancer. Now I wear long
sleeves year-round and go annually to a dermatologist for a thorough going-over.
I’ve learned from these checkups that not every mole or blemish should be
regarded with alarm. Most, in fact, are harmless—even the ones that are new or
scary-looking. By the same token, some pre-cancerous lesions don’t appear as
serious as they truly are. A similar rule applies when we undertake an
examination of conscience. Some things that look bad at first glance are actually
harmless, while others we easily might pass over are potentially lethal. That’s
why it’s helpful to ask a pastor or spiritual director, or maybe just a mature
Christian friend, to sit down with us once a year around the beginning of Lent to
help us with our spiritual self-examination.
My
wife and I enjoy baseball. We like to go to Arizona in March and watch our
favorite teams play a few Cactus League spring training games. It occurs to me
that the annual Ash Wednesday moral inventory is a lot like the rigorous
physical exam baseball players must undergo each year before reporting for
spring training. In fact, we can extend that metaphor and think about the forty
day season of Lent itself as a kind of “spring training for the Christian soul,”
a yearly period of strenuous conditioning meant to discipline and equip us so
we’ll be ready to deal with both the temptations and the inspirations that come
our way during the rest of the year. We’ll need to do the same thing again next
spring, and the spring after that, too, of course. But that’s all part of being
a Christian “player” in the game of life.
The
disciplines that our Lenten “spring training” calls for might be summed up
under three general headings drawn from the portion of the Sermon on the Mount which
is usually read in church on Ash Wednesday (Matt. 6:1-6, 16-21):
1. Prayer, in all its expressions, but especially
the sort of personal communion with God the Father that the gospel shows Jesus himself
practicing. This is what
I like to call “private” worship: intentionally spending time alone with God,
perhaps talking to God, but definitely striving
to listen for God “speaking” to us—remembering
that much of God’s communication to us is in silence. There are many ways to do
this, but in Lent we should undertake something new (at least new to us),
something deep, something with potential to draw us into a new place in our
relationship with God and move us forward in our spiritual journey.
2. The practice of charity and various acts of service to others. This simply means deliberately loving
our neighbors as ourselves. Focusing our attention on others has the salutary
effect of getting our minds off ourselves. What could be healthier for us than
that? Our journey as disciples of Jesus is not just about our private
relationship with God, but about linking our lives in unselfish care for other members of God’s family. This love for our neighbors
will ideally include more than merely physical assistance. Along with meeting others’
needs, our goal should include inviting them into meaningful community with us.
If our chosen method of
practicing charity and service to others in Lent is costly to us in some way,
all the better. Spending ourselves on
loving our neighbors is an essential exercise in a good spiritual spring
training regimen. As with prayer, there are many ways we can incarnate love of our
neighbors.
3. Finally, fasting or abstinence, which is meant to bring under control the
cravings and appetites of what the New Testament calls “the flesh.” The Letter of James says “each person
is tempted when he is lured and enticed by his own desire. Then desire when it
has conceived gives birth to sin.” (1:14-15) Most, and maybe all, of what our annual
moral inventory reveals as sin has grown out of our yielding to temptation,
and—as James points out—we can only be tempted
by what we desire. The ancient and
universal practice of Lenten fasting and abstinence is head-on confrontation
with our desires, our appetites. What we crave might be thoroughly innocent,
but doing without it for forty days is good for us (whether “it” is dessert,
daily dalliance with Facebook, or playing cards). We need lots of practice in
saying “no” to ourselves. Consider this: If we can’t say “no” to something as simple
as chocolate, will we ever be able to deny ourselves, take up our cross, and
follow Jesus? Fasting puts us in touch with how strong our appetites can be. We
must master them, not permit them to control us.
Lent
is spring training for the Christian soul, a time to throw ourselves
whole heartedly into the kind of workouts that will help get us in shape to
follow Jesus more faithfully on the upward way that leads to life.
—Fr. Bruce McNab
Bozeman, MT
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