Sister Elise Saggau
The past year has been one we will never forget. None of us has ever seen anything like this before. And while the pandemic has been not only difficult but deadly, we are able to draw from it some important lessons. First of all, we have experienced what it means to be virtually powerless in the face of something eminently destructive. As it raged among us, we felt ourselves unable to arrest it or “make it better.” The only recourse we had was to protect ourselves, put walls between us and “it” until remedies might be found. Social isolation, so foreign to our way of living, seemed like a radical response. We felt as if we were being caught between two evils. Clearly, we were being tested as a human community. We were carefully and persistently instructed how to use tools for the protection of ourselves and others. These tools demanded of us great personal cost. Some of us chose not to use them; some seemed to find it impossible to use them. Many chose to walk a fine line between using them and not using them. Some lucked out and others didn’t. In the meantime, the disease spread uncontrollably. People got sick. People died.
During these past many months, we have been invited over and over again to practice disciplines that would help safeguard ourselves and others. Practicing these would demonstrate our care about others in the face of our own discomfort and inconvenience. In many ways, these past months have been a lot like living in a long Lent. Lent bids us fast, give alms, and pray in a particularly intentional way. These practices are not primarily for our own personal individual good, spiritual or temporal, but for the common good. To fast is to share in the vast hungers and deprivations of the world—to reduce our intake, not only of food, but of all kinds of self-indulgences that make us forgetful of our own human dependencies. Fasting reminds us of our responsibility to care for others in our human family as best we can. To give alms serves essentially the same purpose. We share with others generously from the abundance we have been given because we are all ultimately responsible for the common good. To pray more intently is to recognize ourselves as beneficiaries of all that is good in our lives. It moves us to live gratefully and deepens our awareness that we share in responsibility for a living community.
Lent is really not about purifying ourselves or making points with God. We actually don’t have the power to do such things. It is about allowing ourselves to expand as human beings. It is about increasing our awareness, deepening our consciousness, letting go of what makes us small and selfish, opening ourselves to greater and higher purposes. As spring begins to break through the frozenness of winter, as our society begins to recover from an uncontrollable disease, Lent reminds us of the possibility of new life that is continually pushing through our self-centeredness. This “push of life” makes cracks in the protective walls we have surrounded ourselves with.
Lent is always about getting ready for something new and unimagined, about getting ready for something beyond death, about getting ready for Easter. For these things to come about, something really has to change within each of us as individuals and within our society as a servant of the common good. We cannot make that change happen, but we can get ourselves prepared. We can practice those disciplines that focus our attention, that turn us outward, that clear our vision. We can be ready when the new thing appears. This is what spring is about. This is what Lent is about. This is what Easter is about. This is what we are about.
