Month: February, 2010Struggling with overwhelming sorrow during Lent – How do I deal with it?
A: These are important questions; let’s take them one at a time. First, embrace the lows of Lent to make the joy of Easter greater? Absolutely. This is the wisdom of the Church. Without suffering it is very difficult for us, in our broken state, to fully experience the joy that God has for us. Kahlil Gibran echoed this thought when he said, “The deeper that sorrow carves into your being, the more joy you can contain… When you are sorrowful look again in your heart, and you will see that in truth you are weeping for that which has been your delight.” So it is with Lent. The deeper we allow the sorrow to carve into our being during Lent, the more joy we will experience when we celebrate his resurrection! Second, is there any joy found during Lent? Without a doubt. When Mel Gibson was making The Passion of The Christ, he ran into a problem. He recognized that the scenes of Christ’s sufferings were too much to take in any one sitting. He came up with the idea to intersperse flashbacks into the story. This gave just enough relief without totally leaving the theme of Christ’s horrific suffering and death on our behalf. Similarly, during Lent, every Sunday we have a time where we can set aside our fasting and remember not only his suffering but also his resurrection and provision for us in the Mass. Beyond this gift, we maintain our composure through all this because we know the end of the story. Those of us who suffer from lifelong illnesses sometimes are overwhelmed because in the midst of our suffering we don’t know if it will end in this life. With Lent we not only know the end of the story, but we even know the exact date when it it will end. This should give us the courage to persevere through the challenges and purification this season brings to our souls. A few more points about grief and depression. It is one thing to feel great sorrow over our sins and to thereby enter into the deep sufferings of Christ, and another to enter into anything like clinical depression or any other unhealthy spiritual or emotional state. With respect to the former, St. Teresa of Avila, after meditating on Christ’s sufferings on her behalf, would often become overwhelmed with grief and weeping for lengthy periods time. The harm done? Absolutely none. In fact, she attributes a great deal of the work of God in her soul, and the souls of other holy men and women, to this kind of affective meditation. How can you tell the difference? The difference is that someone who is truly experiencing union with Christ and his sufferings will experience two things: 1) Peace: Even with intense suffering of this kind, if we maintain peace in the depths of our souls and feel a greater compulsion to love him for what he has done for us, this is a good indicator that our sorrow is truly godly sorrow rather than an unhealthy state of depression. 2) Virtue: If our heightened sense of his love for us and our corresponding love for him leads us to deepen our prayer, expand our acts of charity, or further intensify our mortification, then, again, our suffering is likely sourced in God’s real and active presence in our meditation. St. Paul in his second letter to the Corinthians clearly echoes these truths (emphasis mine):
Finally, if you find yourself with a sorrow that does not meet the test of “godly sorrow” you can do two things about it. First, go absorb yourself in service to others – particularly those less fortunate than you. If the enemy is behind the anxiety in your heart, responding with love toward God and others will drive this oppression away. If you continue to struggle, make sure you talk with your spiritual director to get more specific insights into how you can make this season one in which you grow in your love and knowledge of Christ and in the virtuous life. He is real, present, and good… may he always be so to you, Dan Laughing at Lucifer in Lent
Over the years Lewis’ Luciferian letters have become ever more popular. In 2003 the Fellowship for the Performing Arts created a stage adaptation of Screwtape. It ran for 11 weeks in New York City and is now on a national tour. Walden Media, which produced The Chronicles of Narnia films, has promised a film version, and various famous actors have recorded audio versions of the book — the most recent being Andy Serkis, who plays Gollum in The Lord of the Rings movies. (This audiobook is sold by the Register’s sister company, Circle Press, at CirclePress.org.) Lewis’ classic has also spawned a subgenre of books. Peter Kreeft wrote The Snakebite Letters. Randy Alcorn has written two books, Lord Foulgrin’s Letters and The Ishbane Conspiracy. Screwtape has been featured in a Bono music video and the cartoon strip “Calvin and Hobbes,” and there has even been a Mormon book written in the same style. Lewis didn’t apologize for the fact that Screwtape Letters is an entertaining and amusing read. Indeed, in the opening pages, he quotes Martin Luther and St. Thomas More on the need to take Lucifer lightly. Luther wrote, “The best way to drive out the devil, if he will not yield to texts of Scripture, is to jeer and flout him, for he cannot bear scorn.” For his part, St. Thomas More said: “The devil … that proud spirit … cannot endure to be mocked.” A few years ago, on my blog, I started writing some of my own Luciferian letters for Lent. I found the exercise to be fascinating and frightening fun. It was a challenge to see things from the devil’s point of view. Eventually, I fleshed out the letters and added a plotline that begins on Shrove Tuesday and finishes on Easter Day. What I came to realize as I wrote was that Luther and St. Thomas More were right: One of the best ways to battle against the devil is to mock him. Books in the tradition of The Screwtape Letters do just that. Of course, this doesn’t mean that we dismiss the devil or underestimate his power. What it does mean is that we engage in the battle with a sense of humor and a sense of proportion. We are not mocking the spiritual battle but, rather, the pride and vanity of one who thinks himself the highest while he is really the lowest. Of course we must take sin seriously. The reality of the devil must be admitted, and, especially during Lent, we must enter the spiritual battle wearing our full armor. All I am suggesting is that part of that armor should be the swift arrows of good humor and humility. Laughing at Lucifer is a good way to do just that. Laughing at Lucifer in Lent means that we are happy warriors. We are launching out on the spiritual battle with a spring in our step and a smile on our face. The Gospel says when we fast we should wash our face and put on a smile, and the spiritual writers speak of keeping a “joyful Lent.” We’re not going about as gloomy defeatists. This requires a clear understanding of our own faults and the reality of temptation. As we engage in spiritual battle during Lent, we should do so with the joyful knowledge that, no matter what, Christ’s forgiveness upholds us and that, in him, as St. Paul says, “we are more than conquerors.” When we face temptation, we should overcome it not just with a serious resolve and a whopping amount of self-control, but also with the wisdom and insight it takes to see the temptation for what it is. Then we can sidestep the attack and parry with a counterthrust in the robust spirit of a jaunty swordsman or a laughing cavalier. We fight joyfully because the devil is already defeated. On Easter Day he was trampled down forever. Furthermore, he was defeated in a kind of divine practical joke. It was a plot reversal that would make any filmmaker proud. Jesus is down, and the devil seems to have killed God’s Son. Then, in a totally unexpected twist, Jesus rises again, and Satan is defeated by his own wicked plan. This is the ammunition to fire at Satan. Like a teasing teenager, we can point at Lucifer and say, “Loser! You were hoist with your own petard!” We fight with confidence because Christ has won the victory. St. Paul again: “[N]either death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor present things, nor future things, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.” Finally, laughing at Lucifer in Lent reminds us to laugh at ourselves, too. When we see his mock dignity, his pomposity, his wounded pride, his vaunted self-importance, his know-it-all attitude and his sublime arrogance, we ought to see our own souls reflected there — for, if we can laugh at his foolish pride, then we ought to be able to laugh at our own, as well. I am often reminded of a dear old nun who told me that her confessor had fallen asleep while she was making her confession. She smiled ruefully and said, “Oh dear, it seems that not even my sins are very interesting!” Then she laughed, and at that moment, her real humility was displayed. G.K. Chesterton said that angels can fly because they take themselves lightly. This Lent, if we learn to laugh at Lucifer and laugh at ourselves, we might find that, before long, we too are taking ourselves lightly. Then who knows? Come Easter Day, we might just fly away. Father Dwight Longenecker Provided with permission of the National Catholic Register Father Longnecker also has written a book in this tradition entitled, The Gorgoyle Code The Lenten War on Self – Are You Prepared for Battle?
Seek Him – Find Him – Follow Him Dan Ash Wednesday Fasting and Church Teaching
Before we do that, though, let me offer a few notes of caution: 1) The Church’s laws regarding fast and abstinence today are very mild. As such, they are minimums. One can go beyond what they require and observe a stricter form of penitence, though one is not legally required to do so. 2) There are ways of technically staying within the letter of the law while violating its spirit—e.g., avoiding meat but having a lavish seafood feast. These should be avoided. We want to keep both the letter and the spirit of the law. 3) The Church does not mean us to hurt ourselves by observing penitential practices, and there are a number of exceptions to the law of fast in particular. Anyone who has a medical condition that would conflict with fasting is not obliged to observe it. For example, someone with diabetes, someone who has been put on a special diet by a doctor, someone with acid reflux disease who needs to keep food in the stomach to avoid acid buildup. Now let’s look at the law. Ash Wednesday is a day of abstinence and fast. According to Pope Paul VI’s constitution Paenitemini:
Something to note about the law of fast is that while it acknowledges one full meal, it does not further specify the quantity of “some food” that can be consumed in the morning and evening. You sometime hear or read about “two smaller meals as long as they don’t add up to another full meal” but this is not what the law says. It just says “some food.” That is certainly something less than a full meal, but the Church does not intend people to scruple about precisely amounts. (Also, the “doesn’t add up to another full meal” rule is very difficult to apply since people eat meals of different sizes during the day and the “size” of a meal can be measured in more than one way; e.g., calories vs. volume.) The law does provide that approved local custom can regulate the quantity and quality of this food, but the U.S. bishops have not established a complementary norm regulating this. Nor has any U.S. bishop bound his subjects in this respect, to my knowledge. (Your mileage may vary.) Now: Who is bound to abstain and fast? Here the governing document is the 1983 Code of Canon Law:
“Those who have completed their fourteenth year” mean those who have had their fourteenth birthday (your first year starts at birth and is completed with your first birthday). The obligation to abstain begins then and continues for the rest of one’s life. Not so with the law of fasting. “Those who have attained their majority” refers to those who have had their eighteenth birthday, and “the beginning of their sixtieth year” occurs when one turns fifty-nine (the sixtieth year is the one preceding one’s sixtieth birthday, the same way the first year precedes the first birthday). The law of fast thus binds from one’s eighteenth birthday to one’s fifty-ninth—unless a medical condition intervenes. What about those who are too young to be subject to these requirements? Here Paenitemini states:
As noted, these are legal minimums, and one certainly can do more. Jimmy Akin To read more posts by Jimmy Akin, go to the National Catholic Register |
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