Lent: an inside story
(by Jason Baguia)
HOUSTON, Texas—Social commentators have dubbed our time as the “information age,” an era unfolding on the stage of a “globalized world” inhabited by peoples with a predominant “media culture.” Some homes in this city, the fourth largest in the United States of America, exemplify the milieu.
Within the said dwellings, whether or not Fox television is slated to broadcast the popular singing contest “American Idol” may significantly determine the plot of a working person’s weekday evening. That person’s mood, too, may be aggravated if she happened to be someone who did not vote for sitting US President Barack Obama at the country’s elections last November and the “Idol” telecast is pushed back by 24 hours to make way for the live airing of the chief executive’s address to the nation on economic revival. Obama’s stimulus plan is something that our working person frowns upon on account of possibly implying greater tax contributions from and lower take-home pays for her.
But our working person may take some consolation in fresh memories of the laughter she shared with friends over luncheon while their eyes and ears were engaged by the noontime local TV news of how a pet owner had to call in the cops to calm a chimpanzee gone berserk. She may also choose, on another night, to rid herself of negative energy by hyperventilating with indignation (not necessarily righteously delivered or intended) about how some Oscar awardees hijacked segments of the well-produced show to flaunt their advocacy of same-sex marriages.
Even so, vast, quietly spreading pockets of hope continue to thrive in many places in our showy, ultra-mundane, media-confused age. In the case of our supposed Houston everyman, “Boob tube-, Playstation- and Xbox 360-struck” are only partial descriptions. Saving grace is at hand for him, in that part of him which belongs to the States’ actively evangelical “Bible Belt,” a part that may or may not be a member of the parish of Saint Elizabeth Ann Seton under the Archdiocese of Galveston-Houston, which is headed by Daniel Cardinal DiNardo.
Less than a fortnight ago, the church, which offers Holy Mass in Vietnamese, Spanish or English, heard, through the ministry of 10 diocesan and Basilian priests, the first individual confessions of about 300 of its children and teenagers. Their First Reconciliation Day received poetic affirmation from the weather: Winds tailing a cold front ushered in passing winter rain showers that not only signalled the imminence of spring to squirrels, birds and people but also evoked the divine mercy that touches both the good and the wicked.
It is this mercy that the Christian is called to live with greater depth in this Holy Season of Lent. The Lenten penitential practices of prayer, fasting and almsgiving, while ultimately communitarian in their ends, should be lived with that personal intensity which philosopher Soren Kierkegaard calls “inwardness.” Inwardness has nothing to do with being anxious to the point of paranoia or scrupulosity to hide one’s Lenten or non-Lenten asceticism, but has everything to do with spiritual interiority, being on the road of intimate friendship with the Lord.
The Christian’s response to God should be personal in the sense of aiming at pleasing God and not at pleasing crowds, though it may be public in obedience to our Lord who named each of his followers the light of the world. Nowadays, the Lenten Fast is publicly proclaimed, just as a fast of repentance was publicly enjoined in the time of the prophet Joel, not so that righteousness may be self-righteously showboated before human eyes, but so that as many individual hearts as possible may be broken and penetrated by him who loves truth in the heart, who in the quiet and secret of our hearts can teach us wisdom: Christ who is the Truth and is Wisdom himself.
The Lenten exercises have no meaning outside their being our collaboration in God’s work of opening our hearts to the Son of Man who seeks its depths—molded by our Heavenly Father—as the place to lay his head. This is why our fasting, praying, and giving fail when made a spectacle of just like every other publicity stunt, act of keeping up appearances, item of media curiosity or political gimmickry: To do so would be to treat one’s heart cheaply, selling it for the price of fickle audience adulation when the real, promised prize of the heart’s training is the indwelling of the Holy Spirit commended to our heavenly Father's hands by Jesus Christ as he breathed his last on Golgotha.
If we go for the promised prize, we will gain the joy of realizing that, in the words of Saint Paul, now is the acceptable time of salvation. We will have let our hearts be broken open through prayer, fasting and almsgiving, to the One who, in letting his heart be pierced by a soldier’s lance one Friday afternoon nearly 2,000 years ago, first unleashed in the flesh the floodgates of divine mercy upon our love-starved world.
God always honors our sincere, though imperfect efforts at renunciation of self for love of him and our neighbor. This honoring comes in our increasingly “felt” presence in our hearts of the Crucified and Risen One, our reception in the Spirit, indeed in the Eucharist, of Christ’s most meaningful and empowering dying and rising. Thus are we enabled in turn to become saving manna for one another on this exodus towards eternity in the deserts of our time.
Within the said dwellings, whether or not Fox television is slated to broadcast the popular singing contest “American Idol” may significantly determine the plot of a working person’s weekday evening. That person’s mood, too, may be aggravated if she happened to be someone who did not vote for sitting US President Barack Obama at the country’s elections last November and the “Idol” telecast is pushed back by 24 hours to make way for the live airing of the chief executive’s address to the nation on economic revival. Obama’s stimulus plan is something that our working person frowns upon on account of possibly implying greater tax contributions from and lower take-home pays for her.
But our working person may take some consolation in fresh memories of the laughter she shared with friends over luncheon while their eyes and ears were engaged by the noontime local TV news of how a pet owner had to call in the cops to calm a chimpanzee gone berserk. She may also choose, on another night, to rid herself of negative energy by hyperventilating with indignation (not necessarily righteously delivered or intended) about how some Oscar awardees hijacked segments of the well-produced show to flaunt their advocacy of same-sex marriages.
Even so, vast, quietly spreading pockets of hope continue to thrive in many places in our showy, ultra-mundane, media-confused age. In the case of our supposed Houston everyman, “Boob tube-, Playstation- and Xbox 360-struck” are only partial descriptions. Saving grace is at hand for him, in that part of him which belongs to the States’ actively evangelical “Bible Belt,” a part that may or may not be a member of the parish of Saint Elizabeth Ann Seton under the Archdiocese of Galveston-Houston, which is headed by Daniel Cardinal DiNardo.
Less than a fortnight ago, the church, which offers Holy Mass in Vietnamese, Spanish or English, heard, through the ministry of 10 diocesan and Basilian priests, the first individual confessions of about 300 of its children and teenagers. Their First Reconciliation Day received poetic affirmation from the weather: Winds tailing a cold front ushered in passing winter rain showers that not only signalled the imminence of spring to squirrels, birds and people but also evoked the divine mercy that touches both the good and the wicked.
It is this mercy that the Christian is called to live with greater depth in this Holy Season of Lent. The Lenten penitential practices of prayer, fasting and almsgiving, while ultimately communitarian in their ends, should be lived with that personal intensity which philosopher Soren Kierkegaard calls “inwardness.” Inwardness has nothing to do with being anxious to the point of paranoia or scrupulosity to hide one’s Lenten or non-Lenten asceticism, but has everything to do with spiritual interiority, being on the road of intimate friendship with the Lord.
The Christian’s response to God should be personal in the sense of aiming at pleasing God and not at pleasing crowds, though it may be public in obedience to our Lord who named each of his followers the light of the world. Nowadays, the Lenten Fast is publicly proclaimed, just as a fast of repentance was publicly enjoined in the time of the prophet Joel, not so that righteousness may be self-righteously showboated before human eyes, but so that as many individual hearts as possible may be broken and penetrated by him who loves truth in the heart, who in the quiet and secret of our hearts can teach us wisdom: Christ who is the Truth and is Wisdom himself.
The Lenten exercises have no meaning outside their being our collaboration in God’s work of opening our hearts to the Son of Man who seeks its depths—molded by our Heavenly Father—as the place to lay his head. This is why our fasting, praying, and giving fail when made a spectacle of just like every other publicity stunt, act of keeping up appearances, item of media curiosity or political gimmickry: To do so would be to treat one’s heart cheaply, selling it for the price of fickle audience adulation when the real, promised prize of the heart’s training is the indwelling of the Holy Spirit commended to our heavenly Father's hands by Jesus Christ as he breathed his last on Golgotha.
If we go for the promised prize, we will gain the joy of realizing that, in the words of Saint Paul, now is the acceptable time of salvation. We will have let our hearts be broken open through prayer, fasting and almsgiving, to the One who, in letting his heart be pierced by a soldier’s lance one Friday afternoon nearly 2,000 years ago, first unleashed in the flesh the floodgates of divine mercy upon our love-starved world.
God always honors our sincere, though imperfect efforts at renunciation of self for love of him and our neighbor. This honoring comes in our increasingly “felt” presence in our hearts of the Crucified and Risen One, our reception in the Spirit, indeed in the Eucharist, of Christ’s most meaningful and empowering dying and rising. Thus are we enabled in turn to become saving manna for one another on this exodus towards eternity in the deserts of our time.
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