A Modest Proposal for Lent

"The path to becoming a saint always seems to be booby-trapped with people whom we find especially hard to love." "What exactly is the price that we are expected to pay in order to follow Christ? Love one another or die!" 

From Crisis

By Regis Martin, STD

What exactly is the price that we are expected to pay in order to follow Christ? Love one another or die!

One does not have to turn over too many pages of Holy Scripture before learning the high cost of discipleship. So, what exactly is the price that we are expected to pay in order to follow Christ? To organize our entire lives in complete conformity to a God pierced and crucified for our sins?  

Love one another or die! 

That seems to be the chief, indeed, the only criterion for membership in the communion of saints. Of course, the nice thing about agreeing to sign on is that the price of admission has already been paid—by Christ Himself, who covered all the expenses in advance by laying down His life for us. “In this is love,” writes John, the Beloved Apostle, “not that we loved God but that he loved us” (1 John 4:10). Our part, therefore, is to requite the favor by trying to do our very best in living a life along the same lines. That’s about it, actually. Just imitate Jesus in every possible way. 

But how, as a practical matter, are we to do that? Might it serve as a suitable project, say, for Lent? Suppose we start small by simply loving our neighbor. Will that work? Oh, yes, and our enemies as well, who, as Chesterton shrewdly reminds us, are not infrequently the same person. Christ is witheringly plainspoken on the subject, telling us in the Gospel of St. Luke: 

To you who hear I say, love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who abuse you. To the person who strikes you on one cheek, offer the other as well, and from the person who takes your cloak, do not withhold even your tunic. (6:27-29)  

Only then are any of us likely to get into the Kingdom of Heaven.

There is, happily enough, a silver lining to all this, which Mother Church will often remind us of at no additional charge. And that is the saving grace of knowing we don’t have to like the person we’re obliged to love. In other words, we really are not required to be even the least bit fond of whomever it is God expects us to love. In a sermon I heard the other day, the priest quoted a cousin of his, whose advice, which she delivered on her deathbed at age 93, was always to love everyone but, she added wisely, “from the other side of the street.” Putting real distance between the two of you, she implied, may actually make it easier to love one another, particularly when they are not at all likable.  

But we must remember to pray for them. It is the coin of the heavenly realm, after all, which we are to spend lavishly on those whom we especially do not like. Like that delightful priest character in a story told by Bruce Marshall called Father Malachy’s Miracle, who, finding himself sorely distracted in a tiny train compartment by “a fat man with a face so red and pouchy that it looked like a bladder painted to hit other people over the head with at an Italian carnival,” suddenly realizes how very hard it is to love one’s neighbor at all, and yet how terribly necessary it is to do so. “For the soul behind that bulging, red face had been redeemed by Christ,” he realized, “just as surely as had his own.” And so, closing his eyes in an effort to pray for the fat man, the priest concludes that “If he must love his neighbor, he would love him without looking at him.”  

What was it that Cardinal Richelieu said as he lay dying? When asked if he forgave his enemies, he replied that there were none left. Evidently, they had all died. Of course, for those of us whose enemies are not yet dead, there still remains the persisting obligation of having to pray for them. Which, unless one were a saint, is never an easy thing to do. And wouldn’t you just know it, the path to becoming a saint always seems to be booby-trapped with people whom we find especially hard to love.
“The School of Christ,” says St. Robert Bellarmine, who graduated with high honors, “is the School of Charity. And at the great final examination,” he reminds us, “charity will be the whole syllabus.” Not a test one would want to fail, by the way, since the outcome will quite certainly result in taking yourself straight to Hell, where the cry of the damned soul may be heard to say for all eternity, “I do not want to love. I do not want to be loved. I want only to be left alone.” And God will not stand in their way, even if it means an eternity of self-imposed pain and loss.   

In this time of Lent, then, which Mother Church has wisely given us, let us try and learn once again, as the poet Blake writes, “to bear the beams of love.” Let us at least offer a prayer or two each day for the unpleasant people we are forced to know or to live with. Indeed, who are forced to know or to live with us. It should not come as a surprise for anyone with even a passing acquaintance with the demands of faith that we need this more than ever. 

If God is love, which the entire Johannine testimony is on record as telling us, and if God shows us how to love by first loving us, then it cannot but follow that in order to prove our bona fides we really must try to love one another. And the good news, of course, is that the love with which we have all been enjoined to love one another is nothing less than a share in that very love with which God loves us, which is but another name for God Himself, who is love right down to the very bottom of His divine and absolute being. That should perhaps make it easier to pull off.