The first in series of blog posts for Lent from Sr. Madeleine Gregg, fcJ
Today the Church begins the great season of Lent. For some people, this is a very much-loved season of the liturgical year when they can consciously focus on inner work, opening themselves to the Holy Spirit, deliberately setting aside extra time to connect spiritual awareness to action and movement in their lives, uniting themselves in new and fresh ways to the teachings and example of Jesus.
For other people, Lent is a season of dread, filled with rules and obligations, guilt and regret, anger about hypocrisy and judgmentalism. Prayer, fasting, penance—the Church’s traditional focus for these weeks—these words don’t sound like words of invitation to them. Past experiences of Lent make them feel like failures before they even begin.
I think that one reason—among many others—that Lent feels so difficult, so wrong for so many people is because of a shift in the thinking of the Church about penance that has been developing in the last 500 years or so. In the early church, penance was about three things: 1- cultivating the awareness of the unjust suffering of others and identifying that suffering with the Passion of Christ; and 2-examining the ways in which we cause or contribute to that suffering; and 3-amending our lives to help alleviate the suffering, even if only in small ways. The early church practice of penance had an outward focus of making life better for others.
Today, penance is much more focused on personal sin, guilt, forgiveness and reparation, in terms of what Jesus has done for us through His Passion, Death, and Resurrection, and also of our own, personal actions towards others. I’m not trying, in any way to diminish the reality of our sinfulness and our need for forgiveness, yet we know where an over-emphasis on personal sin can take us: into an endless conviction of our lack of value, into unproductive guilt, into an inability to love freely and wholeheartedly. That has been the legacy of Lent for so many people and I believe it is a distortion, both of this liturgical season, and of the Church as a loving mother, leading us into life.
In our world of today, for ordinary people and for ourselves, we need to find other ways into understanding sinfulness and God’s loving forgiveness. We need to see our life’s journey as leading along a long, sometimes winding, path of transformation to wholeness.
In the last 100 years, a growing theology of creation has led us to understand the spiritual dimensions of the new story of creation. Starting with Edwin Hubble’s recognition in 1929 that we live in an expanding universe and his discovery that scientists could therefore go back in time to find the moment when the expansion started, humankind realized that a new story of creation was written in the cosmos. It is the story of the Big Bang, or, as some more poetically call it, The First Flaring Forth of Light”. The story continues through billions of years of evolution. What we see is the ongoing emergence of increasingly complex forms of life, eventually resulting in creatures (human beings) with consciousness of their connectedness to other beings, with the freedom to choose how to focus their awareness, with the ability to perceive invisible realities beyond what their five senses allow, and with a deep-rooted intuition that all beings possess some degree of interiority and subjectivity.
What an ecospiritual perspective on Lent offers us is the challenge to cultivate in our spiritual lives an appreciation of mutual encounter with the natural world.
