Tonight we are halfway through Lent. We have gone through twenty days and three Sundays. We have twenty days and three Sundays ahead. So it is a good moment to stop and look. What have we been doing with this Lent? Going back and listening to Benedict again:
During these days, therefore, we will add to the usual measure of our service something by way of private prayer and abstinence from food or drink, so that each of us will have something above the assigned measure to offer God of his own will with the joy of the Holy Spirit (1 Thess 1:6). In other words, let each one deny himself some food, drink, sleep, needless talking and idle jesting, and look forward to holy Easter with joy and spiritual longing. [1]
As I listen to those words, I ask myself, To what extent during these past twenty days have I been living in the joy of the Holy Spirit, looking eagerly forward to Easter? To what extent have I been keeping up to my Lenten practices in prayer and self denial?
Marked by joy. This man Benedict fascinates me—his emphasis on joy. How many people have you run into in your life who when you speak of Lent, the first thing that comes to mind is joy? Where is this man coming from? He has set his mark. This is what Lent is all about—entering into the fullness and joy of Easter. Everything else that you do is in the light of that. If I do more praying and fasting, it is just to look forward to, and to be aware of, the joy of the resurrection. The power of that excitement! That what I am called to as a man who has been baptized into the risen Christ is to live in the light of the resurrection. Right now. The powerful grace of Easter calls us to enter more fully into the wonder of that joy.
If I reflect on what Lent has meant to me in these first twenty days, and it has not been marked by joy, why not? Why am I not filled with joy at the prospect of Easter? What can I do about it? What am I going to do about it? Maybe I do not want to be happy after all. Maybe I have given up all hope that I really could be happy. Maybe I want to step forward, as Paul says, “Forgetting what has been up to now” [2]. Set the mark which is the full joy of Easter. Then look at what I need to do—what I want to do—during the next twenty days of Lent so that Easter joy can just explode in my being.
Am I coming so much out of the past? “I have never been a very joyous person. This is ridiculous. I cannot be a joyous person.” Is that where we are coming from? Do we want to come from there? Or can we step out?
A sign of hope and joy. As the grace of Easter shines upon us more fully in these last twenty days, what can we do to let it in our own lives so that it can shine through us into the community? Then it can shine forth from the community to a world that so much needs the joyful hope of resurrection. I think that is what a contemplative community is all about—to be a sign and a source of hope and joy. To be, in some way, instruments which God can use to fulfill Christ’s prayer, “Father that they may share my joy and that their joy may be complete” [3].
The joy of Jesus. We love Christ. Everyone of us loves Christ so much that we gave our life to him. In an even more radical way than a man gives himself to his wife. We have given ourselves to Christ. We want what Christ wants. He wants us to be filled with the joy of God. That joy that was his as the son of God in communion with the Father and the Holy Spirit. Somehow or other, there is this profound paradox (mystery). Christ suffered as no man has ever suffered. He wept over Jerusalem. He hungered. He thirst. He labored. He was tired, disappointed, and betrayed. It was all there. Yet from the depths of his divine being, this person was just filled with the divine joy. He is the divine joy. That is the kind of joy I think he is talking about here. Even as we have the heartaches, headaches, concerns, pains, and tears, there is a deep joy down in the depths.
A source of joy for others. I think that is what Benedict is talking about here when he is talking about prayer, fasting, and abstaining during Lent. In some way we are denying ourselves so we can get a little more in touch—live more out of—the profound joy that shines forth from the risen Christ. The joy that shines into the life of each of us who has been baptized into Christ. It is the joy that shines forth from us into the world if we are transparent. The asceticism and the prayer is to help us to become more transparent so that we ourselves may experience the joy more fully and profoundly. Then we will be a hope and source of that joy for our brothers and sisters.
May we enter the second half of Lent with renewed hope, forgetting what is behind, setting the mark, and pressing forward to the fullness of life in the risen Jesus. And may the Divine Assistance remain with us always. Amen.
Dom Basil Pennington
NOTES
1. RB 49:5-7.
2. “Brethren, I do not consider that I have laid hold of it already. But one thing I do: forgetting what is behind, I strain forward to what is before.” Phil 3:13 (Confraternity of Christian Doctrine edition, 1957)
3. Jn 15:11; 17:13.
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