The Focus of Lent

The season of Lent is pentitential in nature in order to prepare for the upcoming season of Easter in which we celebrate the Glorious Resurrection of the Lord. During this time, we must be mindful that we are rending not our garments, but our very hearts in reparation for our sins. We deprive our bodies of nourishment and empty ourselves in order to teach ourselves humility. When we are hungriest, we begin to realize we are not self-sufficient. Instead, we are completely reliant on God to continue to lovingly care for us and sustain us.

What is the deeper meaning of this exercise, though? Why must we come to recognize that we are completely dependent on God? We need to internalize the idea that God, our loving Father, is constantly thinking of us and that this very thought is what keeps us in existence. When we are hungry and humble, we can more easily experience God's active thought sustaining our existence.

We empty ourselves during Lent - of food, of attachments, of the world - in order to allow Christ to fill us. We seek to become less so that He may become more. We rend our hearts so that he may mend them with the Holy and Life-giving Spirit. Lent is our proving ground where we learn the self-control that allows us to be mindful that Christ is waiting for us to grow in holiness with His Divine Assistance. After all, Christ our God became man so that man could become like God. In a certain sense, in order to cooperate with the grace that seeks to divinize us, we must empty out the humanity that humanizes us - just as Christ emptied himself on the Cross (a process that begins in some ways with his forty days of fasting in the desert). We empty our attachments to the world and fill ourselves again with attachment to Christ - fasting does the emptying, additional or more dedicated prayer does the filling.

Just as our God subjected himself to temptation, we are subjected to temptation. In this season, we are likely to be subject to the temptation of laziness and ease of existence. Although this is a constant temptation regardless of the liturgical season, it is more prevalent during Lent when we are making a concerted effort at self-denial. With the clearer assistance of grace brought about by fasting, we must recognize that we are not self-sufficient in fighting these temptations, constantly turning to our Lord and His Blessed Mother, as well as our Guardian Angel, to assist us in overcoming temptations brought not by demons but by ourselves.

Most of all, we must be mindful that, although we now rend our hearts and mortify our bodies, our Lord has already been raised and sits in Glory at the right hand of God the Father. Lent, then, teaches us to cleanse ourselves and make ready for Easter with the knowledge that Easter has already occurred for Christ - we need only to grow in humility, trust, and repentence in order to prepare for our own resurrection.