by Gratia Plena Spiritual Director Mary Malicki
How are you doing with your Lenten Journey? All my Lents seem to have an embarrassing pattern. Ash Wednesday always finds me exhilarated. I love the fast, my intentions are set and I am going to have a perfect Forty Days. The first Sunday of Lent finds me almost smug about my questing holiness. Then reality sets in the Second Week. I am feeling the physical exhaustion of getting up 90 minutes early for the extra prayer time I promised. I am missing the comfort of the activity I gave up. And I am hungry, craving a snack. The Third Week of Lent finds me a Fallen Lenten Penitent. I’ve snacked, I’ve snuck in a few comfort activities thinking God would not care, and I am a begrudging the extra prayer time. Each year I promise that this Lent will be different. Each Lent it is the same. And so I throw myself on God’s mercy. I have become like a little child hoping that my desire to please God does in fact please Him and that my loving Father God does not micro-inspect my actual “Lenten doings”.
Now, we are approaching Holy Week. I am recommitting myself. I am remembering my friend, St. Thomas Aquinas, who wrote of the four substitutes for God — power, honor, pleasure, and wealth. Lent asks us to come back to God with all our hearts, and our Lenten disciplines of fast and abstinence, almsgiving, increased prayer, and denying a pleasure, addresses each of those substitutions.
I eagerly await Holy Week. During a day of Lenten reflection this year I was asked to write about my favorite Lent, my most successful Lent. I remembered a time as a grade school child (years ago), I asked my father, who worked nights, if we could all go to daily Mass during Holy Week as a family. I expected him to say a firm “No”. Shockingly, and without hesitation, he said, “Yes”. Then I expected grumbling and even retribution-punching from my siblings for involving them in my desire. Neither occurred. Rising in the dark, cold Michigan mornings we drove miles to pre-dawn Holy Week Masses. There was joy. There was peace. That was my best Lent. And that is why I eagerly await Holy Week. That is why no matter how much I have fallen short of my Lenten Promises, I know that I can recommit myself for these last days and my heavenly Father will smile on me, saying “Yes”.
I have been reading a marvelous book, Catholicism, A Journey to the Heart of the Faith by Rev. Robert Barron. I am on fire when I read this book, ironic, since Fr. Barron is the founder of the international media ministry called Word on Fire. If ever you wanted to reconnect with your Catholic foundation I suggest reading this book. But don’t just read it, savor it, let it challenge you. Let it change you.
And let the blessing of the papacy of Pope Francis rain down upon us all.
(you can read Mary’s comments at the beginning of Lent here)