Week 4

As we begin week 4, we are told to be glad. The symbol of that joy is the rose color that we use in vestments and decorations. But isn’t it strange to rejoice in the middle of Lent? Not at all.

Hopefully, since Ash Wednesday, every day we have done some penitential act. Hopefully, we have increased our daily prayer time. We have looked for extra ways that we can be charitable. And if you have not, we still have two and a half weeks of Lent. It’s never too late to start. 

If your parish is using cycle A, you are hearing today about the man born blind. He is all of us. Because of original sin, we were all born blind. Only faith, which is itself a gift from God, and the grace of baptism can heal our blindness. 

But truth be told, it never heals completely in this life. Only in dheaven Willy be have spiritual 20/20 vision. Part of our problem is that we think we see, we think we know, and we judge.  We judge based on our partial vision. 

Even for us who are baptized believers, St. Paul tells us, 

Now we see dimly as in a mirror, then [in heaven] we will see face to face.

It is our partial blindness that can often lead us to sin. We think see. We think we know. We think we know what we need. We think we know what is best for us. We don’t.  We need to keep the limits of our vision in mind. 

Firstly, to remind us that we need a guide.  We need to pray every day for the Holy Spirit to help us to see, to help us to know, to help us choose wisely. 

Also, we need to remeber our partial vision whenever we judge another person. We need to remind ourselves that we never see the whole picture. Only God sees that. 

As we age our physical eyesight fails just a bit more.  Let us pray that as our physical eyesight fail, God may increase our spiritual eyesight. 

At the end of week one

Perhaps you have had a great first week of Lent; perhaps you have already “failed” at the Lenten tasks you set for yourself. Whichever the case, today that week comes to an end and we look forward to tomorrow, the Second Sunday of Lent. 

On this last day of the first week, the gospel could make us throw up our hands and give up, as Jesus tells us to be “perfect.” It’s seems impossible until we remeber that the text uses teleios, and not anamartetos.  We are commanded to be perfect not sinless. 

Perfect in the Greek or Latin sense means complete. It grows out of the understanding that when each of us was created by God, he already had in mind the person we were meant to be, there is a goal (Greek-telos). For each of us that goal is both unique and identical.   We each fit into God’s plan in a unique way. On the other hand, the goal is the same for all of us, oneness with Him. 

In this season of Lent, we use bodily discipline, fasting. We use prayer. We use charity. All of these serve a double purpose. 

In the first place, we look back. We do them as Penance for sins committed. 

In the second place, we look forward. We use the discipline of Lent to help us focus, so that we might adhere more closely each day to path that God has marked out for us, the path on which we walk with Christ. There is no discipleship without discipline. 

Tomorrow we begin week two. Take some time today to plan how it will be even better than week one. 

Simplicity of prayer

When I was a child, we would tense up if grandma Bess was the one to say grace. My family we your average Baptists. We used “God is great.God is good...” grandma would pray spontaneously. She would go on and on, as the mashed potatoes got cold. 

Fifty years later I now hear Catholics who, in a grass is always greener mindset, think they now need to abandon rote prayers, as if something they make up on the fly is more “real” prayer. They forget what Jesus himself tells us,

In praying, do not babble like the pagans, who think that they will be heard because of their many words. Do not be like them. 

Even more Jesus tells us why.

Your Father knows what you need before you ask him. 

God does not need me to tell him what to do. He does not need to see me beg like a child desperate to have his way.

Some will claim that they are praying in the spirit.  St. Cyprian in writing about the Our Father says

What prayer could be more a prayer in the spirit than the one given us by Christ, by whom the Holy Spirit was sent upon us? 

In this Lenten Season, let us spend more time in prayer,  but let us also keep our prayer simple. Prayer is not us telling God what we want; it is the lifting of our mind and heart to him. 

The same struggles

In yesterday’s gospel we heard about temptation. Today we pick up with an interesting list of commands, interesting for the specific subjects they address. It is a basic principle, that laws are given to address problems. If there is a law forbidding something, then you can bet it was a problem in the community. 

Stealing, lying, theft– these are reaffirmations of things already addressed in the 10 commandments. But then Leviticus veers into what we think of as more modern territory, the treatment of the disabled, the rights of workers, the ways we are to judge others, the spreading of slander. Today’s passage from Leviticus even dives into what we call “sins of omission”. We are reminded that we cannot stand idly by when our neighbor ‘s life is in danger. 

Then we are reminded that there are sins that reside in the inmost parts of our heart: hatred and grudges. 

In a short reading today we are reminded that we must look at all four categories of sin we confess at Mass: thoughts, words, what we have done, and what we have failed to do. 

On this Monday of the first full week of Lent, perhaps it is a good take to find some quiet time and place to do a thorough examination of conscience looking at all four kinds of sin. 

A world without sin

More and more our culture has moved away from the language of religion. Some of this is being done based on particular reading of the non-establishment clause in the constitution. Much of it – as a flight from the guilt that churches are accused of heaping on people in the past. In this flight from religion one of the words we have thrown out is the word “sin.”  There is just one problem. People continue to do bad things. 

Without the word sin, we paint ourselves into a corner. How do we deal with wrongdoing? The only word, the only lens we have left for viewing bad behavior is “crime.” We then move to criminalize it. We ask the law to do what law was never meant to do. And when that fails we then move to public shaming (the online world which inflicts the life sentence). 

Perhaps we would be better off calling sin “sin.” Sin names to quality of the behavior. It identifies the violation of the moral law.  The advantage is that the word sin also admits of contrition, repentance, and forgiveness. 

Today’s first reading begins with the words, 

To the penitent God provides a way back.

Imagine if, here in Vrginia, we called the recent “blackface” scandal sin. 

The offender woud express contrition, do some appropriate penance, and receive forgiveness. The offense is not ignored. Nor is it simply left hanging out there, hanging over the person’s head forever. It is punished for what it is. There would be a way back.

St Paul reminds us in his letter to the Romans that,

all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God. 

When we forget this truth, we become judgmental, unforgiving.  Wednesday we begin Lent, 40 days in which we are called to judge no one but ourselves. 

Fill in the plank

In the gospels Jesus uses examples from ordinary life as metaphors for much deeper spiritual realties. In today’s gospel he goes to an example which not on carpenters but anyone who had ever worked with wood would know, the splinter on the eye. 

Our eyes are incredibly sensitive, even the smallest particles can be unbelievably painful. Our reflexive reaction is to close our eye the second we perceive anything getting near it. For some of us, even trying to put eye drops in becomes a challenge. The eye just wont stay open. 

Let something get in our eye and, no matter how small, it feels enormous. Our eyes start to water and we can’t see. Jesus takes this painful common experience and expands on it. 

In the parabole, the tiny speck is not in our own eye, but in the eye of our brother or sister. In our own eye is a dokos, a support beam, the kind one uses in construction. 

It is interesting how Jesus plays with  “charity”. Except it is not real charity, it is that fake charity which is really judgement. We claim to be concerned for our brother or sister because they (not we) are  on the wrong path. We claim to want to help them.

Jesus once again reminds us that we have to start with ourselves. We must remove the beam from our own eye. Our vision must be healed before we can presume to see and remove the speck from the eye of our brother or sister. 

The process requires several steps:

     First, we must feel the pain of the plank in our own eye. 

    Then we must get it removed. Often this will require the help of others. 

    But then there will be a hole and much damage to our vison. The hole must be healed which can only be done by the grace of God. 

    Then having lived the experience of conversion, we can lead other. 

In the upcoming season of Lent. We are each called to examine our lives, to find the plank, the beam, in our eye. If you think you don’t have one pray harder for God to reveal it or ask a loved one who will tell you the truth. 

We all have them.our tendency is to reverse the story. We put the beam in the other person’s eye and the speck in our own. Lent is a time for honesty. 

Prayer, fasting, and charity. Those are the tools we need to pry the board loose. And then God can fill the space created with love giving Grace.