I don’t know about you, but as a kid, I never liked Lent. I knew it was the time before Easter, but I always saw it as the time I was sweets-deprived for no apparent reason. It felt like Lent was about giving things up, about complete self-deprivation (I was a dramatic child). My Lenten journey was so often centered around not being able to eat chocolate for 40 days a year.
But as I grew older, my perception of Lent began to change as I slowly began to understand the meaning behind penance, the meaning behind the Lenten season as a whole. Pope Francis perfectly sums up the way I began to see Lent:
“The path to Easter demands that we renew our faces and hearts as Christians through repentance, conversion and forgiveness.”
I began to focus on how penance can prepare hearts for Easter as we embark on a journey of resisting temptation to mirror Christ’s own journey in the desert.
Throughout the years, I gave up sweets, fried food, the Snooze button, and many other things. I always searched for ways to grow closer to God through fasting of something I desperately wanted. And each year, when Easter came around, I went to church, celebrated Christ’s resurrection, and then pigged out on whatever it was I gave up and pretty much continued in my life as if nothing had changed in those 40 days.
The last two years of Lent have felt different. I don’t know if it’s because of the pandemic or the state of the world right now or just pure divine intervention, but recently my reverence for Lent has shifted. Suddenly, when I gave up meat (for real this time), I found myself filled with an overwhelming sense of hope. Hope for my own personal Lenten journey, hope for my fasting, almsgiving and prayer, and most importantly, hope for the grace hidden within the paschal mystery.
As I look back on my Lenten journeys, hope has been overpowered by grief and pain. And yes, Lent is about grief, resisting temptation, all of that, but in the last two Lenten seasons, I’ve learned that it is so much more. It’s more than the fasting from chocolate or the Snooze button, it’s more than the almsgiving through volunteering, and it’s more than the additional daily prayer.
What’s the point of all of this if not to hope for the mercy given to us by the grace of God? How beautiful is it to have a season of 40 days, roughly 10% of the year, dedicated wholly to preparing our hearts to receive grace that is so abundant, so overwhelming, and so unconditional? How beautiful is it that we, with sin-stained hearts, are so loved by a perfect God that He sacrificed his Son to wash it all away?
In one particular episode of Ted Lasso, because of course I have to bring him into this, he says,
“I feel like we fell out of a lucky tree, hit every branch on the way down, and ended up in a pool of cash and Sour Patch Kids.”
First of all, this is one of my favorite quotes of the entire show, and when I first decided to include these quotes in each of my blog posts, I never imagined that this would be the one I used during Lent. But in a lot of ways, this is what Christianity is like. The joy, the happiness that comes from a relationship with Christ feels a lot like landing in a pool of cash and Sour Patch Kids. The Lenten season reminds us of the lucky tree that we are in, even if our fall down it sometimes hurts. Except in our case, it’s not a lucky tree, it’s the tree of life and of love.
This is what the Lenten season is all about. It is a season of hope as we fall through the tree. It is a season to prepare our hearts to receive the paschal mystery with profound openness and reverence. It is a season to cultivate a deeper understanding of the hope we have as Christians. As we continue through the second half of this Lenten season, I invite you to not only renew your own personal promises of fasting, almsgiving, and prayer, but I invite you to see each of them in a new light, the light of hope. In the darkness of the desert, of Calvary, and of the tomb, I pray that our hearts will be transformed through the hope of the resurrection. For it is in hope and hope alone that faith can grow and we can become fully united in the self-sacrificing, unconditional, and overwhelming love of Jesus Christ.
Blue skies,
Morgan
