We know what Lent is all about, if we admit it

Back in my wild days of the barroom, we used to celebrate everything: anybody’s birthday, Tuesday, the full moon. You name it, we celebrated it.

Children were easy to love in those days in the warm glow of a couple or three whiskies after work. The feelings were all gushy and sentimental and fond, uncluttered by the realities of dirty diapers and having to feed them at ungodly times.

Come to find out, though, that celebration without accomplishment is so very empty, and fuzzy feelings don’t have anything to do with love. Love is something you do.

Lent starts this week, and like most Catholics, I find myself face to face with the great challenge of conversion, again. Somehow I think we Catholics have always known the real challenge of Lent; we can feel it in our bones, something very familiar and personal. Before the Great Council, there was a lot of hype about the rules and regulations and pious practices. Since the Council, there’s a lot of hype about there not being so many rules and regulations anymore and talk about pious practices is more loosely construed. Always, though, Lent was really something else: something inside and inexplicable and important, and we knew it. It has to do with little old me and God.

Here soon, Jesus will be going into the desert and beckoning me to follow Him. The desert, the vast, quiet, uneventful place devoid of the incessant messaging of the ear which has become our society. The desert, where there’s nobody to talk to but God, and I don’t want to go there.

It’s spooky out there, and hard and lonely and no good shows on. I stand at the edge and everything in me cries out forget it! No big deal! Who needs it! Bunch of nonsense! Why bother! Keep on keepin’ on, man!

Am I alone in this? We know the challenge of Lent, I’m sure. Fasting doesn’t have anything to do with some rule that says not to eat. That’s dumb. Fasting has to do with focusing our attention away from everything familiar and therefore distracting to us, even something as basic and ordinary as eating, so that we can satisfy our real craving, our hunger for God. Lenten practices, if you will, whether doing something or not doing something, whether required or self-imposed, are surely empty if they are so much stagecraft. We’ve always known that. The buzzing about the rules or lack of them is just one more delaying mechanism for coming to terms with what we know Lent is all about: seeing the truth about ourselves in relationship to God.

I’ve spent a lot of Lents letting things slide, and sure enough Easter was a zero. I did not rise with the Risen Christ because I had not died with Him. It was like those empty celebrations of yore. The new fire burned brightly and I was witness to it in my community, but the new fire did not burn in me. Oh, I wanted to celebrate and rejoice, all right; but I had eyes that could not see and ears that could not hear. I could not celebrate because I had not accomplished.

My friend Pete enjoys motocross, but he as little patience with people who want to talk about motocross who have not experienced motocross. They haven’t done it, he says, so they don’t know about it.

It’s one thing to feel all gooey and nice about my kids in the neighborhood tavern. It’s quite another to come home and have my kids give me a wide berth because of my ill humor and impatience and lack of interest in their affairs.

We’ve always known what Lent is about, and if you’re like me, you fight it tooth and nail. If you’re like me, you make small talk about the rigors and do whatever else you can to avoid confronting what your heart is screaming at you. It’s true I don’t know just what it’s screaming, what it’s saying, what the truth is. I don’t want to know. I don’t want to go into the desert where I can hear and see clearly.

I took one step into the desert one time, from the grass at the edge to the sand. Some journey, huh? Ah, you know what a journey it was. We Catholics, we’ve always known the challenge of Lent, known in our hearts. You don’t get to be an Easter people, with joy unsurpassed, with no sand in your shoes. –T.R.

written by Thomas A. Russell
first published in the Lafayette Sunday Visitor on March 1st, 1987