Practice during Lent (2)
By By Dom Prosper Guéranger | 21 February 2024
Extract from The Liturgical Year
The courageous observance of the Church’s precept of fasting and abstaining during Lent must be accompanied by those two other eminently good works, to which God so frequently urges us in the scripture: prayer and alms-deeds. Just as under the term “fasting” the Church comprises all kinds of mortification; so under the word “prayer”, she includes all those exercises of piety whereby the soul holds intercourse with her God. More frequent attendance at the services of the Church, assisting daily at Mass, spiritual reading, meditation upon eternal truths and the Passion, hearing sermons, and, above all, the approaching the sacraments of Penance and the Holy Eucharist — these are the chief means whereby the faithful should offer to God the homage of prayer, during this holy season.
Alms-deeds comprise all the works of mercy to our neighbour, and are unanimously recommended by the holy doctors of the Church, as being the necessary complement of fasting and prayer during Lent. God has made it a law, to which he has graciously bound himself, that charity shown towards our fellow creatures, with the intention of pleasing our Creator, shall be rewarded as though it were done to Himself. How vividly this brings before us the reality and sacredness of the tie, which he would have to exist between all men! Such, indeed, is its necessity, that our heavenly Father will not accept the love of any heart that refuses to show mercy: but on the other hand, he accepts, as genuine and as done to himself, the charity of every Christian who, by a work of mercy shown to a fellow man, is really acknowledging and honouring that sublime union, which makes all men to be one family, with God as its Father. Hence it is, that alms-deeds, done with this intention, are not merely acts of human kindness, but are raised to the dignity of acts of religion, which have God for their direct object, and have the power of appeasing his divine justice.
Let us remember the counsel given by the archangel Raphael to Tobias. He was on the point of taking leave of this holy family, and returning to heaven; and these were his words: “Prayer is good with fasting and alms, more than to lay up treasures of gold: for alms delivereth from death, and the same is that which purgeth away sins, and maketh to find mercy and life everlasting (Tob 12:8,9). Equally strong is the recommendation given to this virtue by the Book of Ecclesiasticus: “Water quencheth a flaming fire, and alms resisteth sins” (Sir 3:33). And again: “Shut up alms in the heart the poor, and it shall obtain help for thee against all evil” (Sir 29:15). The Christian should keep these consoling promises ever before his mind, but more especially during the season of Lent. The rich man should show the poor, whose whole year is a fast, that there is a time when even he has his self-imposed privations. The faithful observance of Lent naturally produces a saving; let that saving be given to Lazarus. Nothing, surely, could be more opposed to the spirit of this holy season, than the keeping up a table as richly and delicately provided as at other periods of the year, when God permits us to use all the comforts compatible with the means he has given us. But how thoroughly Christian is it, that during these days of penance and charity, the life of the poor man should be made more comfortable, in proportion as that of the rich shares in the hardships and privations of his suffering brethren throughout the world! Poor and rich would then present themselves, with all the beauty of fraternal love upon them, at the divine banquet of the Paschal feast, to which our risen Jesus will invite us after these forty days are over.
There is one means more whereby we are to secure to ourselves the grand graces of Lent; it is the spirit of retirement and separation from the world. Our ordinary life, that is, such as it is during the rest of the year, should all be made to pay tribute to the holy season of penance; otherwise, the salutary impression produced on us by the holy ceremony of Ash Wednesday will soon be effaced. The Christian ought, therefore, to forbid himself, during Lent, all the vain amusements, entertainments, and parties, of the world he lives in. As regards theatres and balls, which are the world in the very height of its power to do harm, no one that calls himself a disciple of Christ should ever be present at them, unless necessity, or the position he holds in society, oblige him to it: but if, from his own free choice, he throw himself amidst such dangers during the present holy season of penance and recollection, he offers an insult to his character, and must needs cease to believe that he has sins to atone for, and a God to propitiate. The world (we mean that part of it which is Christian) has thrown off all those external indications of mourning and penance, which we read of as being so religiously observed in the ages of faith; let that pass: but there is one thing which can never change: God’s justice, and man’s obligation to appease that justice. The world may rebel as much as it will against the sentence, but the sentence is irrevocable: “Unless ye do penance, ye shall all perish.” (Lk 13:3) It is God’s own word. Say, if you will, that few nowadays give ear to it; but, for that very reason many are lost. They, too, who hear this word, must not forget the warnings given them by our divine Saviour himself, in the Gospel read to us on Sexagesima Sunday. He told us, how some of the seed is trodden down by the passers-by, or eaten by the fowls of the air; how some falls on rocky soil and gets parched; and how again some is choked by thorns. Let us be wise, and spare no pains to become that good ground, which not only receives the divine seed, but brings forth a hundredfold for the Easter harvest which is at hand.
An unavoidable feeling will arise in the minds of some of our readers, as they peruse these pages, in which we have endeavoured to embody the spirit of the Church, such as it is expressed not only in the liturgy but also in the decrees of Councils and in the writings of the holy Fathers. The feeling we allude to is one of regret at not finding, during this period of the liturgical year, the touching and exquisite poetry, which gave such a charm to the forty days of our Christmas solemnity. First came Septuagesima, throwing its gloomy shade over those enchanting visions of the mystery of Bethlehem; and now we have got into a desert land, with thorns at every step, and no springs of water to refresh us. Let us not complain, however; Holy Church knows our true wants, and is intent on supplying them. Neither must we be surprised at her insisting on a severer preparation for Easter, than for Christmas. At Christmas, we were to approach our Jesus as an infant; all she put us through then, were the Advent exercises, for the mysteries of our Redemption were but beginning.
And of those who went to Jesus’ crib, there were many who, like the poor Shepherds of Bethlehem, might be called simple, at least in this sense — that they did not sufficiently realise, either the holiness of their incarnate God, or the misery and guilt of their own conscience. But now that this Son of the eternal God has entered the path of penance, now that we are about to see him a victim to every humiliation, and suffering even a death upon a Cross, the Church does not spare us; she rouses us from our ignorance and our self-satisfaction. She bids us strike our breasts, have compunction in our souls, mortify our bodies, because we are sinners. Our whole life ought to be one of penance; fervent souls are ever doing penance; could anything be more just or necessary, than that we should do some penance during these days, when our Jesus is fasting in the desert, and is to die on Calvary? There is a sentence of this our Redeemer, which he spoke to the daughters of Jerusalem on the day of his Passion; let us apply it to ourselves: “If in the green wood they do these things, what shall be done in the dry?” (Lk 23:31) Oh! what a revelation is here! and yet, by the mercy of the Jesus who speaks it, the dry wood may become the green, and so, not be burned.
The Church hopes, nay her whole energy is labouring, that this may be; therefore, she bids us bear the yoke; she gives us a Lent. Let us only courageously tread the way of penance, and the Light will gradually beam upon us. If we are now far off from our God by the sins that are upon us, this holy season will be to us what the saints call the purgative life, and will give us that purity, which will enable us to see our Lord in the glory of his victory over death. If, on the contrary, we are already living the illuminative life; if, during the three weeks of Septuagesima, we have bravely sounded the depth of our miseries, our Lent will give us a clearer view of Him who is our Light; and if we could acknowledge Him as our God when we saw him as the Babe of Bethlehem, our soul’s eye will not fail to recognise him in the divine Penitent of the Desert, or in the bleeding Victim of Calvary.
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