Looking Toward Lent

"Lent stimulates us to let the Word of God penetrate our life and in this way to know the fundamental truth: who we are, where we come from, where we must go, what path we must take in life." ~ Pope Benedict XVI's address delivered during the General Audience on Ash Wednesday 2006, St. Peter’s Square

From Crisis

By Regis Martin, STD

Lent is coming upon us quickly this year! Will we sit still long enough to slow it down, or just let another one pass us by?

"I have often said," writes Blaise Pascal in the Pensées—the crowning achievement of his life’s work, left unfinished at his death in 1662—“that the sole cause of man’s unhappiness is that he does not know how to stay quietly in his room.” Even five minutes spent in solitude, it seems, is more than flesh and blood can bear.  

Might that account for the high rates of crime we’ve been seeing in recent years, that those for whom being alone is simply unendurable will often strike out in antisocial ways in order to escape their torment? A fascinating question, to be sure, but not where I want to go with this, which is to try and put a good word in for remaining quietly in one’s room. And to provide a suitable send-off for the season of Lent, which will soon be upon us.

“Teach us to care and not to care,” writes T.S. Eliot in “Ash Wednesday,” his purgatorial poem announcing his conversion to Christianity, along with the start of 40 penitential days leading to Easter. “Teach us to sit still, / Even,” he adds, “amid these rocks.” And since Eliot’s aim here is to hear the Word—“the unheard, unspoken / Word…the Word within / The world and for the world”—then there must be silence for such speech to happen, for it actually to be heard.

“Where shall the word be found,” he asks, 
where will the word
Resound? Not here, there is not enough silence
…
The right time and the right place are not here
No place of grace for those who avoid the face
No time to rejoice for those who walk among noise and deny the voice…

Only amid the silence are we likely to hear what God is trying to tell us. This is especially the case when we find ourselves alone in our rooms with nothing to do save but to wait on God, who then may tell us what to do. “Suffer me not to be separated,” asks Eliot at the very end of the poem, quoting words from the Church’s liturgy, spoken by the priest before ascending the altar to offer a pure sacrifice to God: “And let my cry come unto Thee.”

When asked how best to preparefor another feast, that of Christmas, Erik Varden, bishop of Trondheim in Norway, gave the following advice, which certainly applies to every feast in the Church, including Ash Wednesday, which will shortly be ushering us into that most solemn time of all, the sacred season of Lent. “Sit in a chair for five minutes—ten, if you have the time—every day without doing anything.”  

It is a matter, he says, “of simply being still, listening to the stillness.” That’s all. And lest one think he’s recommending some kind of Quietism, which the Church condemned centuries ago for its attitude of not doing anything, of not caring a whit about the final outcome, whether it be paradise or perdition, the answer is No. That is not at all what he has in mind. Inasmuch as the spiritual life is centered upon the will, the exercise of which is to move us to greater love of God and neighbor, one cannot remain idle or indifferent in the face of the obligation to love. One does not become a Christian, much less remain one, without having to do something.

What Bishop Varden is telling us, and with an eloquence infrequently found among prelates, is that the reason for silence, for retreating into that inner stillness, is in order that we might find that it isn’t a place bereft of life or promise at all. 

Recovering, or perhaps even discovering, that deep silence within ourselves will help to make us realize that it isn’t an empty resonant space, but in fact, it is an inhabited space, a space of openness, and we could almost say of hospitality, because all of us yearn for that receptivity to the Word coming among us, coming to you and coming to me. 

Isn’t that how God first came to us, the condition in which He first entered the world? “The Word didn’t come with a huge cry,” Bishop Varden reminds us, “but as an infant, a word which, in Latin, means speechless.” 

Such a great mystery that is. A screaming paradox, no less. The Word unable to speak a word! Into that wordless abyss, the Word descends, stripped of all power, including even the power of speech. An astonishing act of kenosis, exceeded only by that final act of the Cross, where the pierced and crucified Christ will reach into an even deeper silence, a kenosis no greater than which can be imagined.

And it was all done for us and for our salvation—pro nobis—a phrase which the Latin Church insisted on inserting into the Creed in order to authenticate the fact of God’s perfect solidarity with the human race following its headlong fall from grace.

Bishop Varden explains, 

The reason God needed to become Man was to overcome mortality, which is the wages of sin, and to restore to humanity that opening towards eternity for which it was made, for which it was intended. The memory of that promise of immortality remains within us mortals, as a kind of wound almost, a painful yearning whose promise needed to be restated and realized afresh.

Because each of us is a being wholly out of joint, wounded by the devil with the lesion of concupiscence, God needed to come down among us, giving us another and far greater wound, that of divine love. “He raises man from the ground to which he has fallen,” declares St. Irenaeus, “and by giving the whole of man scope in himself he also assumes man’s death into himself.” 

How impoverished our understanding of Christ’s Passion must be if, in the exercise of divine incarnate love, we fail to see that we are to be delivered not only from our sin and squalor but in the very midst of it. God’s Word having long since entered into man, there can be nothing so daunting therein to frighten or distress him now. 

And only God, of course, is able to reach right down to the very heart of our wretchedness, to pry man loose for the journey home to Heaven. A journey we are both privileged, and urged, to once more begin anew each time Lent rolls around. From out of the ashes of Lent, let us enter into the silence that leads to Easter joy.