Practice during Lent (1)

By Dom Prosper Guéranger   |   14 February 2024

Extracts from the Liturgical Year

It is important to note that the discipline of the Church has changed since the mid-nineteenth century when Dom Guéranger was writing. The observances of fasting and abstinence, to which he refers in their “present mitigated form”, are now much further reduced.

After having spent the three weeks of Septuagesima in meditating upon our spiritual infirmities, and upon the wounds caused in us by sin, we should be ready to enter upon the penitential season which the Church has now begun. We have now a clearer knowledge of the justice and holiness of God, and of the dangers that await an impenitent soul; and, that our repentance might be earnest and lasting, we have bade farewell to the vain joys and baubles of the world. Our pride has been humbled by the prophecy that these bodies would soon be like the ashes that wrote the memento of death upon our foreheads.

During these forty days of penance, which seem so long to our poor nature, we shall not be deprived of the company of our Jesus. He seemed to have withdrawn from us during those weeks of Septuagesima, when everything spoke to us of his maledictions upon sinful man; but this absence has done us good. It has taught us how to tremble at the voice of God’s anger. “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of Wisdom” (Ps 110:10); we have found it to be so; the spirit of penance is now active within us, because we have feared.

And now, let us look at the divine object that is before us. It is our Emmanuel; the same Jesus, but not under the form of the sweet Babe whom we adored in his crib. He is grown to the fulness of the age of man, and wears the semblance of a sinner, trembling and humbling himself before the sovereign majesty of his Father, whom we have offended, and to whom he now offers himself as the Victim of propitiation. He loves us with a brother’s love; and seeing that the season for our doing penance has begun, he comes to cheer us on by his presence and his own example. We are going to spend forty days in fasting and abstinence: Jesus, who is innocence itself, goes through the same penance. We have separated ourselves, for a time, from the pleasures and vanities of the world: Jesus withdraws from the company and sight of men. We intend to assist at the divine services more assiduously, and pray more fervently, than at other times: Jesus spends forty days and forty nights in praying, like the humblest suppliant; and all this for us. We are going to think over our past sins, and bewail them in bitter grief: Jesus suffers for them and weeps over them in the silence of the desert, as though he himself had committed them.

No sooner had he received Baptism from the hands of St John, than the Holy Ghost led him to the desert. The time had come for his showing himself to the world; he would begin by teaching us a lesson of immense importance. He leaves the saintly precursor and the admiring multitude, that had seen the divine Spirit descend upon him, and heard the Father’s voice proclaiming him to be his Beloved Son; he leaves them, and goes into the desert. Not far from the Jordan, there rises a rugged mountain, which has received, in after ages, the name of Quarantana. It commands a view of the fertile plain of Jericho, the Jordan, and the Dead Sea. It is within a cave of this wild rock that the Son of God now enters, his only companions being the dumb animals who have chosen this same for their own shelter. He has no food wherewith to satisfy the pangs of hunger; the barren rock can yield him no drink; his only bed must be of stone. Here he is to spend forty days; after which, he will permit the angels to visit him and bring him food.

Thus does our Saviour go before us on the holy path of Lent. He has borne all its fatigues and hardships, that so we, when called upon to tread the narrow way of our Lenten Penance, might have His example wherewith to silence the excuses, and sophisms, and repugnances, of self-love and pride. The lesson is here too plainly given not to be understood; the law of doing penance for sin is here too clearly shown, and we cannot plead ignorance; let us honestly accept the teaching and practise it. Jesus leaves the desert where he had spent the forty days, and begins his preaching with these words, which he addresses to all men: “Do penance, for the Kingdom of heaven is at hand” (Mt 4:17). Let us not harden our hearts to this invitation, lest there be fulfilled in us the terrible threat contained in those other words of our Redeemer: “Unless ye shall do penance, ye shall perish.” (Luke 13:3)

Now, penance consists in contrition of the soul, and in mortification of the body; these two parts are essential to it. The soul has willed the sin; the body has frequently co-operated in its commission. Moreover, man is composed of both soul and body; both, then, should pay homage to their Creator. The body is to share with the soul either the delights of heaven or the torments of hell; there cannot, therefore, be any thorough Christian life, or any earnest penance, where the body does not take part, in both, with the soul.

But it is the soul which gives reality to Penance. The Gospel teaches this by the examples it holds out to us of the Prodigal Son, of Magdalene, of Zacheus, and of St Peter. The soul, then, must be resolved to give up every sin; she must heartily grieve over those she has committed; she must hate sin; she must shun the occasions of sin. The Sacred Scriptures have a word for this inward disposition, which has been adopted by the Christian world, and admirably expresses the state of the soul that has turned away from her sins: this word is conversion. The Christian should, therefore, during Lent, study to excite himself to this repentance of heart, and look upon it as the essential foundation of all his Lenten exercises. Nevertheless, he must remember that this spiritual penance would be a mere delusion, were he not to practise mortification of the body. Let him study the example given him by his Saviour, who grieves, indeed, and weeps over our sins; but he also expiates them by his bodily sufferings. Hence it is, that the Church, the infallible interpreter of her divine Master’s will, tells us, that the repentance of our heart will not be accepted by God, unless it be accompanied by fasting and abstinence.

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There are but few social questions which have not been ably and spiritedly treated of by the public writers of the age, who have devoted their talents to the study of what is called political economy; and it has often been a matter of surprise to us, that they should have overlooked a subject of such deep interest as this, the results produced on society by the abolition of Lent, that is to say, of an institution, which, more than any other, keeps up in the public mind a keen sentiment of moral right and wrong, inasmuch as it imposes on a nation an annual expiation for sin. No shrewd penetration is needed to see the difference between two nations, one of which observes, each year, forty days’ penance in reparation of the violations committed against the Law of God, and another, whose very principles reject all such solemn reparation. And looking at the subject from another point of view, is it not to be feared that the excessive use of animal food tends to weaken, rather than to strengthen, the constitution? We are convinced of it — the time will come, when a greater proportion of vegetable, and less of animal, diet, will be considered as an essential means for maintaining the strength of the human frame.

Let, then, the children of the Church courageously observe the Lenten practices of penance. Peace of conscience is essential to Christian life; and yet it is promised to none but truly penitent souls. Lost innocence is to be regained by the humble confession of the sin, when it is accompanied by the absolution of the priest; but let the faithful be on their guard against the dangerous error, which would persuade them that they have nothing to do when once pardoned. Let them remember the solemn warning given them by the Holy Ghost in the Sacred Scriptures: “Be not without fear about sin forgiven!” (Sir 5:5). Our confidence of our having been forgiven should be in proportion to the change or conversion of our heart: the greater our present detestation of our past sins and the more earnest our desire to do penance for them for the rest of our lives, the better founded is our confidence that they have been pardoned. “Man knoweth not whether he be worthy of love or hatred” (Sir 9:1); but he that keeps up within him the spirit of penance, has every reason to hope that God loves him.

Originally published at www.liturgialatina.org