On Prayer

During Lent, the Church calls to take up three traditional practices, all of which are mentioned in the Gospel for Ash Wednesday: prayer, fasting, and almsgiving. Today, I’d like to focus on prayer.

Too often we tend to think of prayer as a chore or obligation, and one that we are not particularly good at keeping. Like flossing. You know, like when you go to the dentist and he asks if you’ve been flossing and so you feel guilty for not flossing, which inspires you to be better at flossing, but unfortunately it only lasts about two days and then the incentive wears off? Sometimes prayer can feel like that too.

And yet at the same time, we tend to wonder where God is in our lives and why He doesn’t make Himself known more. But how can we encounter God in our lives if we never make time for Him? That’s like expecting someone, to whom we never even talk, to solve all of our life problems. Perhaps we would take prayer more seriously if we understood it for what it truly is: our own personal time with the One Who alone can speak the words we so desperately need to hear, Who alone can answer the deepest questions of our hearts. 

This Lent, may we try to see prayer not as one more item on our already over-crowded to-do list, but as the place we go to find strength and peace from our over-crowded to-do list. Not as another thing in our lives, but as the one thing our lives cannot be without. Basically, as something just a little more important than flossing...

Pax Vobiscum

Four-Letter Words That Begin with "L"...

I hate Lent. No, I’m serious. I really hate Lent. I hate Lent because it forces me to say “no” to myself. And that hurts. It really hurts. And I don’t like it.

And that, I’m afraid, is kind of the point. I don’t mean to say that the whole point of Lent is pure misery and suffering for the sake of misery and suffering, but the whole point of Lent is to re-direct our love back to Christ. What do we really love? I mean really. I don’t mean “to what do we pay lip-service because we know we have to?”.  I mean what do we really love? What are the things in life that make us say, “I can’t live without...”(fill in the blank). Lent is simply the time to re-examine that question, and to remove those things in our life that perhaps fight for our love, for the place in our life that only God is meant to have.

The Collect (the Opening Prayer) for Mass today (Ash Wednesday) says, "Grant, O Lord, that we may begin with holy fasting this campaign of Christian service, so that, as we take up battle against spiritual evils, we may be armed with weapons of self-restraint." When was the last time we approached Lent as a "campaign of Christian service" or a "battle against spiritual evils"? Furthermore, how often do we think of self-restraint as a weapon with which to arm ourselves agains the Enemy? Yet that is the reality we live in. We live in a world at war, a war between the Kingdom of God and the Kingdom of Satan. And the fight is over our hearts. Lent is a time to take that fight seriously and to exercise our spiritual muscles so that our allegiance to God is made all the stronger. And one of the greatest weapons we have is the ability to say "no" to ourselves, for that is exactly the opposite of Satan's strategy. 

Saying “Yes” to something (or Someone) means saying “no” to other things. Loving someone, truly loving them, means at some point saying “no” to ourselves. Loving Christ means saying “no” to ourselves. And that’s the part that hurts. But anything in life worth doing is almost always going to cost us something. Anyone worth the loving is worth the hurting. And that’s okay. Because we are made for more than just creature comforts and guilty pleasures. We are made for love, and not just love, but the highest love. The kind that can can only be found when Jesus is truly the one thing in our life that we can’t live without.

So you don’t have to love Lent. You just have to love Jesus.

Pax Vobiscum