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The Order of These Forty Days: 7QT XVI Seriatim

The Order of These Forty Days: 7QT XVI Seriatim

Last updated on: March 9, 2017 at 2:05 am by Scott Eric Alt

The Order of These Forty Days: 7QT XVI Seriatim 2017-03-09T02:05:42-04:00 Scott Eric Alt

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Of all that is missing in my spiritual life, the biggest void is order. My soul is a clutterhouse. My prayers are unscrubbed, my confessions buried under a pile of sin, my spiritual reading scattered far and yon, good intentions left to rust, and devotions lost and upturned amid the general junk.

Time for Lent.

II.

In 2013 I gave up blogging for Lent. I did not do that last year, and I am not going to do that this year. It was a real trial, to indulge the ability to read online what mad people were saying, but then not have the ability to write a post and say, “You know what? You’re mad.”

So none of that this year.

I do not yet know what I want to give up. Every time Ash Wednesday approaches again, I sense a vacant gap in the brain where I should know the right thing to sacrifice for forty days. The gap tells me, every year, that I have no undue attachments, and that I should stop fooling myself. Maybe I’ll give up giving things up.

III.

I believe that the right spiritual devotion for Lent will find you each year. It’s wrong to wrack the mind or read fourteen suggestions from fourteen different bloggers to find the right one. Just look at that shelf of unread Catholic books (you do have one, don’t you?) and wait for one to leap out into your waiting hands. It will.

Yesterday morning I was searching my apartment in vain for the book I was sure I finally wanted to read as my Lenten devotional: The Dolorous Passion of Our Lord Jesus Christ. Nope. Wouldn’t be found. Has gone into hiding behind any of the numerous secret spaces that exist amid 10,000 books.

(Having as many books as I do aids a life of constant surprise. I am always bumping into titles I never knew I had.)

I stared at a shelf and at once saw the right devotional reading for this Lent: Thomas Mertons’s No Man is an Island. It’s about time. It’s only been sitting there for 20 years.

IV.

I have never really understood why, when Mother Teresa’s writings were published and we learned for how much of her life she felt the absence of God, people wailed that she never really was that wonderful saint the popular imagination presumed her to be.

Are you kidding?

To feel that dry, that long, and still do what you do every day, and still pray, and still say, “For love of Christ”: That is sainthood. That is holiness.

I don’t do that. When I feel dry, I’m more apt to stop talking to God altogether.

Which is why I need order in my spirit and spiritual exercises in my Lenten days.

V.

Lent is my favorite season of the liturgical year. I never understood why that should be until I became Catholic and acquired Catholic guilt.

Guilt is underestimated. The reason is because the world is delusion. Life and breath and things and joys are seductive. Some people tell jokes all the time because it keeps them above the pain. But that doesn’t heal the pain, it just shuts it behind a door so that you can pretend it’s not there. Open that closet overstuffed with wrong and guilt and it will likely crash on your head and knock you insensible.

But the continued reality is our own sin. And to face reality, in weight and sorrow and ash, is to have the opportunity to finally turn joy real. Avoidance is not joy. You don’t go around Lent to get to Easter, you go through Lent; avoidance of Lent is not Easter, but Hell.

After 45 years, I know my sins well enough to know (1) that I keep committing them; (2) that therefore I keep returning every year to Lent; (3) that I can rejoice in God for giving me Lent. It is the one liturgical season I most need, so that I can have the one liturgical season I most desire.

VI.

Really, if I must give up anything this Lent, it is an attitude. It is right to feel sorrow over one’s failures. It is another to feel sorry for oneself.

That is what I will give up. (Okay, and meat too. It’s a good discipline.)

VII.

I often think the greatest gift that God can give to anyone is His absence.

That’s when we know we need Him. It makes us cry for Him.

Read more of this week’s quick takes at Conversion Diary.

***

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