i hope you are having a penitential triduum

O all ye who passe by, behold and see;
Man stole the fruit, but I must climbe the tree;
The tree of life to all, but onely me:
                                              Was ever grief like mine?

Lo, here I hang, charg’d with a world of sinne,
The greater world o’ th’ two; for that came in
By  words, but this by sorrow I must win:
                                              Was ever grief like mine?

Such sorrow as, if sinfull man could feel,
Or feel his part, he would not cease to kneel.
Till all were melted, though he were all steel:
                                              Was ever grief like mine?

But, O my God, my God! why leav’st thou me,
The sonne, in whom  thou dost delight to be?
My God, my God ------
                                              Never was grief like mine.

Shame tears my soul, my bodie many a wound;
Sharp nails pierce this, but sharper that confound;
Reproches, which are free, while I am bound.
                                              Was ever grief like mine?

Now heal thy self, Physician; now come down.
Alas! I did so, when  I left my crown
And fathers smile for you, to feel his frown:
                                              Was ever grief like mine?

In healing not my self, there doth consist
All that salvation, which ye now resist;
Your safetie in my sicknesse doth subsist:
                                              Was ever grief like mine?

Betwixt two theeves I spend my utmost breath,
As he that for some robberie suffereth.
Alas! what have I stollen from you?  Death.
                                              Was ever grief like mine?

A king my title is, prefixt on high;
Yet by my subjects am condemn’d to die
A servile death in servile companie:
                                              Was ever grief like mine?

They give me vineger mingled with gall,
But more with malice: yet, when they did call,
With Manna, Angels food, I fed them all:
                                              Was ever grief like mine?

They part my garments, and by lot dispose
My coat, the type of love, which once cur’d those
Who sought for help, never malicious foes:
                                              Was ever grief like mine?

Nay, after death their spite shall further go;
For they will pierce my side, I full well know;
That as sinne came, so Sacraments might flow:
                                              Was ever grief like mine?

But now I die; now all is finished.
My wo, mans weal: and now I bow my head.
Onely let others say, when I am dead,
                                              Never was grief like mine.

-- From The Sacrifice by George Herbert
(Read the whole thing here.)

on confessions and penance

From Arturo Vasquez. Scroll down past the Lope de Vega and Longfellow poems. Not sure I agree with him entirely, in the end. But he writes beautifully, convincingly, and anyway I'm at least 90% on board. I guess the point is: its beautiful.

Tomorrow is the beginning of Lent. Prepare. To help you, here are two of my old posts about keeping a holy Lent. I haven't got a lot to add to them. Looking at the blog-o-meter, it seems that a lot of people have been visiting these two pages in the last month or so. I commend them to your attention, and hope you find them helpful.

Keeping a Holy Lent Part One: Theory

Keeping a Holy Lent Part Two: Practice

keeping a holy lent -- part ii: practice

Lent is for the purpose of our growth in grace and in the knowledge of the Lord Jesus (2 Peter 3.18). Always keep this in mind. Lent isn’t about the disciplines. The disciplines serve the end of intimacy and communion with the Lord. The discipline is about driving the detritus of sin and distraction out of your heart and thereby making room for grace. So don’t forget that the whole point of Lent is growing in grace and knowledge of the Lord.

There are traditionally five Lenten tools for growing in grace and knowledge of the Lord:

1) Retirement
2) Prayer
3) Fasting
4) Repentance
5) Almsgiving

Retirement serves prayer. Go into your closet and shut the door and pray in secret (Matthew 6.6). It may seem silly even to mention, but nevertheless: it is a great help actually to remember to set aside time every day, preferably in the morning and in the evening, to be by yourself with God. This means going into your bedroom, or some place where you can be undisturbed and alone, closing the door, and praying.

Fasting, again, serves the end of growth in knowledge and love of the Lord. Let’s be honest: one aspect of life in time and space, an aspect, in other words, of being a human in the world, is that we are surrounded by all kinds of other created things. And those things are not bad. We don’t need to go far in the world, though, before we run into trouble. We are after growing in knowledge of the Lord. But we humans get easily overwhelmed by STUFF. And knowledge of STUFF can (and does) distract us from knowledge of the Creator of Stuff. Because our intellects are finite, we cannot hold everything there at once. And the danger is that we forget God by constantly remembering this and that. This is what St. Paul was talking about when he said of those whose minds became darkened that they changed the truth about God into a lie and served the creature rather than the creator (Romans 1.25). The great danger is that we become so attached to the STUFF around us that it becomes our master and our god. Then we are no better than pagan idolaters.

The provenance of idolatry is not pagan antiquity. It is life in space and time. Idolatry is just as much a danger to the 21st century Christian. And this is the point of fasting. We force STUFF out of our lives (whether it be food or television or whatever), and thereby create a space in our consciousness for the grace of God. Let’s face it: while you are gratifying your appetite (whether it be by eating another donut or by watching MTV), you are not praying. That’s a fact.

Repentance is our acknowledgement before God of the above facts: that we HAVE forgotten him, over and over and over again. And one of the chief avenues of our forgetfulness of him is the gratifying of our sinful appetites. We serve the creature rather than the creator, and we do it over and over again, every day, year in, year out. And the fact that our very existence in this world is geared toward this forgetfulness, that the deck is stacked against us because we are surrounded by so many tantalizing distractions, and in some cases we are even genetically predisposed to acquiesce to them (think of alcoholism) -- this fact is original sin: those things about the world which, through no fault of our own, nevertheless seek to trap us and mire us down in sin. This is the fallenness of the world, and we sin without even realizing it. So once we have fasted, forced some particular attachment out of our lives and out of our consciousness, and once we have gone into our room and shut the door, and once we have spoken to God in prayer, it is time to acknowledge our situation to him. This is repentance. To come to God on his own terms, to acknowledge what he knows too well: quia peccavi, that I have sinned.

Almsgiving is about our being not merely a repository of God’s grace, but also its conduit. Think in this regard of the Blessed Virgin. She was indeed “full of grace” (Luke 1.28). But though the grace of God most certainly flowed into Mary it did not merely pool up inside of her. It was not just for her benefit. It was given to her and stayed with her in an intimate and exclusive way for nine months, but then (O then!) it issued forth from her. Then it was given to the world in the most ecstatic and total way. The grace of God flowed through Mary; and some thirty-three years after flowing through her, it was poured out utterly for the sins of the whole world (1 John 2.2).

So once you have made a space in your heart for God’s grace, through retirement, prayer, fasting, and repentance, do something for others. Share something of what God has given you -- and he has given you everything you have -- with your fellow creatures, that they might come to grow in grace and the knowledge of the Lord as you have -- and you have.

keeping a holy lent -- part i: theory

What is Lent for?

Lent is instituted in the Church that we may “grow in grace and in the knowledge of our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ” (2 Peter 3.18).

Contrary to superficial appearance, Lent is therefore not a sorrowful time. It is a time of Joy. The word “Lent” comes from the Anglo-Saxon word for Springtime. The season of Lent is a time, while beginning with the darkness and rain of penitence and self-denial, yet ending with the full flowering of Easter morning.

It is important to remember, therefore, the Joy of what George Herbert called the “feast of Lent,” because it is a time of spiritual joy. It is an opportunity to engage with the enemy, to subdue him in those things which keep us from the grace of God. In one of those reversals typical of our religion: the outward fast is an inward feast; the outward continence is inward and ecstatic intercourse with the Bridegroom.

Father Congreve, SSJE, in the 19th century compared the joy and hope of Lent to the joy and hope of an army which rounds a bend in the road and sees for the first time the battle lines of the enemy arrayed in front of it. It is a heady hope, tempered perhaps by the realization of what actually is at stake, but a hope and a joy no less for that.

“But Lent rallies us, reminds us of the seriousness of our moral life, of the reality of sin, of bad tendencies of our childhood not conquered yet, of the strength of sins of the flesh, of pride and temper, of love of the world, of cowardice in confessing Christ, of sloth and depression, of neglect of prayer and the sacraments. As we look up, Lent shows us the way to God and our heavenly country, and right across that way, cutting off our road to God and holiness, lies our sin. So Lent brings us to face the enemy and prepare for battle. And hope is the very soul of a battle: the men intend to win that position now held by the enemy at any cost. So in your case, suppose there is sloth, or unbelief, or ill will, or some other vice: your Lent battle means your hope to wrest that position from the enemy. That sin, that indifference, or bad temper, shall be conquered by God’s help. There is no evading the issue; that sin is going to conquer me, and separate me from God for ever, or I am going to conquer it.”

So too, a great part of the joy of Lent is the realization, upon beholding the sin lying between us and God, separating us from Him, is the force of the realization that we are not our sin. Sin is no part of our identity in Christ. We are not of that camp lying across the path. We are in God’s army, and not in the camp of the enemy. A great part of the joy of confronting our sins in their full array is the force of the fact that we are separated from them, by the grace of God, that they are there only to be conquered, and we are by contrast here only to conquer them.

And that, by the way, is a common misconception these days: that in Christ sin and evil are denied (cf. ECUSA). The truth, though, is that our Lord’s suffering and death on the cross do not deny it. The cross looks at sin and death full in the face. The cross acknowledges the horror and the hideousness of sin and evil. Our crucified Lord acknowledges it, confronts it head on, and destroys it. And likewise he does not look at us and say “you are not a sinner,” but rather sees the truth about us: that we are wretched sinners. But the power of the love of God for us in his Son is so awesome precisely because it does not deny our sinfulness, but instead overcomes it in God’s own glorious, loving perfection. The cross of Christ has the power to change us, to re-create us. And Lent is about cooperating with that power and submitting to it.

Lent is about the blossoms of the tree on which our Lord hung, blooming not only in our memory, but in our will and intellect as well. Continuing with the martial analogy, Father Congreve says “So Lent means that you are not going to play at soldiering any longer, but that you take up Christ’s Cross in sober earnest, and begin to follow Him closely. As you strive by prayer and self-denial to follow, you are keeping well up with our Leader, Who knows who is with Him, and the swing of the march of His companions cheers you.” To take up our cross daily and follow Jesus (Luke 9.23) really means to take up his cross in our own circumstances. Lent means our active use of what God has brought about on the Cross in our lives through the grace of the sacraments. “The energy of every Christian’s Lent resolution is the stirring up of the life of God that is in him – the calling up of the power of Christ’s victory over sin, and putting it forth under new circumstances.”

What is Lent for? It is for growth in grace and knowledge of the Lord, for progress toward him in his perfection.

How is this undertaken? Remember that Christ is our Life and Truth, but is also the Way to our Life and Truth. As perfect God, Jesus is our destination; the goal, the prize, the end of the road is a share in the divine nature. And as perfect Man, Jesus is our way to himself as God. He is both the journey and the destination.

In this life, we are concerned immediately with the journey, never keeping our eyes off of the destination, so that we may not wander from the path (1 Corinthians 9.24ff). Lying in our path is sin. Sin is arrayed against us in the road, cutting us off from our destination. But because our Lord has blazed this trail and faced this foe for us, we know that what defeats the enemy that is sin, is the suffering and death of Jesus.

Lent is about this confrontation in its particularity, in our own lives. We are, in imitation of our Lord, and through his power, to deny ourselves and take up our cross and follow him.

Read Father Congreve's text, Of Advance in Lent, here.

Next: How is this done? Retirement, Prayer, Fasting, Repentance, and Almsgiving.

keeping a holy lent

Fr. Frank Logue at King of Peace Church in Georgia has provided helpful information about the season of Lent, and offers suggestions on how to use Lent profitably. Here is the link.

"The custom is to mark the season of Lent by giving up some things and taking on others. Both can serve to mark the season as a holy time of preparation. Some examples of things people give up for Lent include sweets, meat for all or some meals, and alcohol. In most cases, giving up something for Lent can be made more meaningful by using the money or time for another purpose. For example, meal times on fast days could be spent in prayer. Another example is that if you give up meat during Lent, the extra money that would go to meat dishes can be given to a group, such as World Vision, which works to end hunger worldwide. Some things added during Lent are daily Bible reading, fasting on Fridays, times of prayer, taking a course of study related in some way to spirituality.

Note that the season of Lent is forty days plus the six Sundays. This is because Sundays are celebrations of Jesus’ resurrection and are always an appropriate day to lessen the restrictions of Lent. So that if you have, for example, given up chocolate for Lent, you could indulge in a weekly candy bar on Sunday.

Lent is also an especially appropriate time for the sacrament of confession. While confession to a priest is not required to receive God’s forgiveness, it can be a meaningful rite of reconciliation to God."