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SUNDAY SPECTATOR
March 27, 2005
Easter MMV
I don't know about my reader but I have had a good Lent; the best ever. This is because usually I set my own regime but this year not. Usually I give up meat alcohol sweets whatever. I resolve to follow the Catholic Liturgy of the Hours or at least the meditative Office of Readings in daily prayer. (As an Anglican I used to follow the old Divine Office pre-Vatican II.) I deny myself something new or unusual for a variation on prior Lenten schemes. For instance I resolve to avoid the company of some lady friend on whom I have a secret crush; and instead to visit a certain lonely old woman in a senior's home. And other things still more absurd. These are like the New Year's Resolutions I used to make before I began taking Christianity seriously. (Indeed once upon a time I was an atheist.) But instead of January 1st the resolutions would be applied on Ash Wednesday and be good only through the Easter Vigil with breaks on the Sundays. They were the same sorts of resolutions whether Christian or heathen always with a subtext of self-interest. Not eating for instance: "I need to lose some weight." Observing the Offices: "This will make me more time-efficient." And even visiting the old and feeble and ill is a bargain one has made with oneself: for it will make me feel better. I shall be able to go away thinking Oh, David, you are such a kind, thoughtful boy. Moreover the resolutions are immediately broken. The New Year's ones collapse immediately under the weight of the year's first hangover; the Lenten ones disintegrate under very slight temptations. The definition of Sunday gets stretched from dusk Saturday to Monday dawn. I grant myself indulgences. By about Maundy Thursday I realize that I've made a hash of every single promise which suddenly I remember was made not to myself but God. As a Catholic now and saying Confession one feels embarrassed to admit the cloud of venial sins: not because they weigh so heavily upon one's conscience but as a matter of etiquette. How can I waste a good priest's time with all these trivialities? Why not just lump them together like so many unpaid invoices on one spike? I do believe I promised to take Lent more seriously on each of the last twenty Ash Wednesdays. I don't remember once succeeding. Perhaps my Christian readers (or Jews or Muslims who have attempted to observe fasts) will have similar experiences. Even those convinced godless who have attempted a mere diet without the haziest spiritual intention will recognize the dull feeling that comes over the mind after one has scarfed the buttered buns. The sense of one's own personal worthlessness. This in itself is worth having: "That we will know the truth and the truth will make us free." Morbid self-loathing is not to be advised; but a lively sense of one's own incapacities is on any view a beginning of wisdom. For any monotheist it is a reminder of our complete dependency on God for anything good that is to be got out of us. And Chesterton said famously Anything worth doing is worth doing badly. The answer is not to give up but keep trying. And one could go on trying forever spinning one's wheels in the absence of grace. The strange thing about the human condition however is that this grace is inevitable. Sooner or later it breaks through the clouds and our prayers are answered -- though seldom in the way we had imagined. In my own case though I can't go into details my good Lent came in the form chiefly of pain. To my perpetual tax audit and garnish was joined a serious legal nightmare a moment of personal heartbreak and an excruciating stress-triggered back injury. I could not have hoped for a better combination or a more timely for all the threads began to knot together precisely as Lent began making my usual resolutions redundant. Don't feel sorry for me or you will miss my point. A "good" Lent is after all the echo of "Good" Friday. It is to be called into the Garden of Gethsemane to pray with our Saviour there. Easter is the Resurrection of Our Lord. It is necessarily preceded by the harrowing and the Cross. And the beauty of our salvation we cannot begin to taste until we have begun to know its price. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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