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| What February looked like this week. Cloudy sky but clear air, and unseasonably warm. |
One of the things I like about February – and there are not many – is the combination of increasingly intense sunshine with clear, dry winter air. Several times over the past week, on days both unseasonably warm and seasonably subfreezing, I have been brought up short in wonder at a view or vista that I have surveyed a thousand times already, but find newly brilliant and beautiful: lighted with greater radiance and warmth, enhanced in crispness, clarity, and contrast, and extending to greater distance. I suppose it’s like HDTV – only real.
One of the things I like about this February is that it’s got no Lent in it. I know, I know, February brings penance enough of its own; but having these extra weeks before beginning the Great Penance offers a sort of luxury, and it is not one that finds me indulging in all those earthly goods one usually puts aside in Lent. No, it’s the luxury of time to prepare.
My God, my God, do I need Lent. I would guess that you urgently and intensely need Lent, too, and I hope you won’t find grounds to accuse me of projecting or whatever they call it. Since we have all been subjected to the same brutalizing circumstances over the past two years, though different afflictions have afflicted each of us in different degrees, I suggest that Lent is the unifying remedy.
Of all our complaints, of all our problems, of all our losses, and of all of the abuse heaped upon us, the one universal is sin, and by that I point today to our own sin. Responding to danger with licensed self-preservation has unleashed a torrent of selfishness. Social distancing has left us distant from God and one another. Resentment is the only sport in which we are all Olympians now.
Our sad state is to be expected, but not excused. The surly spite and bitter rancor that laces our lives is predictable, and you will be glad to know, pardonable; but not because it’s no biggie, or not a problem, or worse, because everybody’s doing it. It is pardonable because Jesus Christ was nailed to the cross by that very spite and rancor, and His merciful forgiveness flows toward us from His wounded side.
To Noah, God promised never again to destroy mankind with a flood, so He redeems us with one: this same flood of mercy, the blood and water that surges toward us from the Cross. This is the wellspring of the Church’s sacraments, which alone can repair and restore you and me after the damage we have endured and inflicted.
In this bright, warming light, and cold, clear, dry air, we can see revealed of ourselves what has been obscured too long: all the hurt, and all the hurtfulness of sin that has gained the upper hand in our lives. In these dragging days of winter’s grudging grip, we can clearly make out the features of our yearning, not only for deliverance from confinement and fear, but also for the communion that we forsook, with God and His friends, our friends, our neighbors, brothers, and sisters.
This gift of high-definition insight, and the luxury of added days, has given me a craving for the grace that only comes in the season we dread, and an opportunity to resolve so to enter into this coming gift of Holy Lent as to allow it to grab hold of me and shake me. Where will I place myself, to allow His grace to find me? What tasks will I take up, to allow Him to show what repair He will work on me? What distractions will I put aside, to allow Him to captivate me?
As I write this, two months from tomorrow will be Easter, 17 April. That, too, is in my window of the “ideal” time for the celebration, when the weather and the flowers are most likely to be perfect. More reliable than fickle spring, though, is the reconciling will of our Father. If we let Him, if we ask Him, if you and I willingly, eagerly return to Him with sorrow for all we have done and failed to do, then He will knit up all that fear and rancor has unraveled, and we will rejoice in that great days together, as one. The same God who brings springtime every year with blossom, brightness, and leaf, will work even greater marvels than that in my heart, and yours.
Monsignor Smith
