Last week I mentioned the practicality of Lent. Our Lord kept His own Lent, His own Forty Days of prayer and fasting, and the Church calls us to follow His Lenten discipline, to make His fast ours. Not only does she call us to follow Him in His fasting, she calls us to fast for the same reason He did and for the same purpose.
The Lord Christ went to the desert to be tempted, to face down the supernatural wiles of the devil with His humanity, the humanity He shares with each of us. Scripture tells us of three temptations He endured: temptations of the flesh, expressed in everyday human hunger; temptations to power and wealth, being shown all the kingdoms of the world; and the devil’s constant and most powerful temptation, in his bag of tricks since he used it on Adam and Eve. The wily serpent whispered “You can be like God.” That’s the one all of us fall for, though we call it many things. It’s the temptation to put ourselves at the center of everything. To say to God “Not as Thou wilt, but as I will.”
This is why the Lord Jesus kept the first Lent: to face the temptations of human nature and turn that nature over to God. That’s why we keep Lent, too. We don’t need to wander off into the wilds of West Texas to find our temptations. We just need to pay a bit of attention to how we’re living our lives. The Lord Jesus never sinned. We each have plenty of experience with sin. We’re all experts at it; experts, too, at hiding our sins—from each other, but even more so, from ourselves.
We know the temptations of the flesh, to pervert pleasure to lust and gluttony and sloth. We share the temptations of the soul, to hoard and conceal and lie, amassing the trinkets of life. We want to lord it over the people around us, twisting the relationships of our lives, our family, friends and neighbors, in a grotesque game to bloat our sense of self-worth. And the temptation of the spirit that runs through it all, to turn from God and make ourselves the measure of all things.
To face these temptations and to beat them down, we have the same old tools the Church has been laying before us since Christians began keeping Lent. They’re the same old tools because we each of us are addressing the same old problems.
Temptations of the flesh, temptations of the soul, temptations of the spirit: they never change. We’ve been falling for the same old Seven Deadly Sins over and over again since the days Adam and Eve crept around the Garden looking for fig leaves.
Prayer, fasting and almsgiving: these are the Lenten tools to deal with our everyday temptations.
How do we use them? We use tools to take care of specific problems. Banging with a hammer at something requiring a screwdriver usually doesn’t work. Why fast? Why pray? Why give alms? What are we intending to do with these things?
God made us as sacramental creatures, men and women whose bodies, souls and spirits are intimately linked. Kneeling, kissing, eating and drinking, saluting, bowing, hugging: these are acts of the body with meaning for the soul and spirit. When I fast, I’m not just refusing to eat—I’m refusing to eat for a reason. My spirit is telling my body that pleasure isn’t everything. Pleasure isn’t a bad thing, but there are things much more important. For us to understand that, we fast. We don’t eat. We let our stomachs growl and our spirits grow. St Augustine said, “Give your prayer the wings of fasting.” In past times, when Christians were less timid than today, they abstained not just from food but from sex during Lent: they understood—and believed—the links between body, soul and spirit better then, and were less afraid to say so. Give up not just tacos for Lent but sex? I’m not saying you should, but I’m not saying you shouldn’t, either!
In this “modern” world, we’re described principally in statistical and economic terms. Our families are “units,” we are “consumers.” We “buy into” the notion ourselves. Money and power, security and status, these have become the stuff of our lives, how we understand ourselves. Almsgiving, giving away money and all it implies, is intended to show us we are not “of this world.” The Prayer Book teaches us graphically in the Funeral Service that it doesn’t matter what we have when we die, it’s all lost to us. The Lord Jesus Himself teaches us no less graphically that it doesn’t matter what we have when we live either, dead or alive, we’re in God’s hands. Lent reminds us to not forget the poor, to give to those in need. But with equal force Lent says we don’t need most of what we have anyway. “Where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.”
Prayer is, according to St John of Damascus, “the lifting of the heart and mind to God.” Prayer is asking God for the things we need, physically and spiritually. But that’s only the beginning of prayer, not its goal. Every day for many years, the Cure d’Ars, a French priest of the early 19th century and the patron saint of all parish priests, saw an old peasant sitting near the Altar of the church, looking up at the crucifix. Finally the Cure asked him, “What are you saying to Him?” The old man replied, “Nothing. I look up at Him, and He looks down at me, and it is good.” Prayer is being with God, giving ourselves to Him; prayer is the only real antidote for the poison of selfishness.
What are the temptations you face? What is your favorite sin, the one you so cling to? The Church’s toolbox contains just what you need to address it. Come this Lent, will you pick up the tool you need and use it?
If you don’t quite know how, ask. The clergy are expert sinners, too.—Fr Gregory Wilcox
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