Second Sunday In Lent
~ Happy St. Patrick’s Day, one and all! This has been a long winter, but spring really is just around the corner, starting this week! Lent began relatively late this year. Some people prefer a wintry Lent. It’s easier, they say, to enter into Lent’s penitential mood and focus on the spiritual life when you’d just as soon stay indoors, curled up with a good book. Others see in springtime’s progress a perfect image of the journey toward the rebirth of nature and the spirit. The romance languages derive their word for the forty days of Lent from the Latin word for forty, quadragesima. In Italian, Lent is quaresima, in Spanish, cuaresma, and in French, careme. But our English ancestors chose lente, the Middle English modification of an old English word for spring, lencten, to name these forty days. The word even sounds like lengthen, which is exactly what the daylight hours do as winter gives way to spring.
So springtime is a perfect season for Lent! These lengthening days of Lent may find us venturing out more and more as welcome relief for the long winter’s cabin fever. We may be familiar with the wintry texts of Lent that remind us of our mortality, “ashes to ashes and dust to dust…” But there are also texts – ancient and modern, from Lenten liturgies of East and West – that strike a springlike tone. Consider this, a chanted announcement of the season from the Eastern Church:
The Lenten spring shines forth, the flower of repentance! Let us enter the fast with joy, O faithful! Let us not be sad. Receive Lent with gladness, O people! Prove yourselves to be children of God!
An ancient poem from the sixth century also brings spring to mind:
As spring awakens frozen earth, so Easter blooms from Lent’s restraints.
Rejoice! For Christ will conquer death and bring his grace to make us saints!
Inspired by that ancient text, the contemporary Benedictine poet John Patrick Earls has written a Lenten morning poem and prayer:
As the sun with longer journey melts the winter’s snow and ice,
with its slowly growing radiance warms the seed beneath the earth,
may the sun of Christ’s uprising gently bring our hearts to life.
Through the days of waiting, watching, in the desert of our sin,
searching on the far horizon for a sign of cloud or wind,
we await the healing waters of our Savior’s victory.
This talk of seed and new life, movement and growth, remind us that the warming and lengthening days of spring are meant to be a time of work! There is no harvest without the work of plowing and planting. So, too, there can be no Lent without the hard work of authentic conversion, and no preparation for Easter without a sincere commitment to prayer, fasting, and works of charity. We will examine these three Lenten disciplines over the next three Sundays.
