ANOTHER BORING LENT

Abba Elias the priest said “To find joy, lament your sins.”—from Words of the Desert

Lent is for sinners. When I quit sinning, I’ll quit keeping it. If my past is any guide to my future, I have as many Lents in front of me as I do years.

Lent invigorates me and irritates me. I enjoy its challenges, but tire easily of its constant emphasis on sin—especially my sin. If Lent focused on what a sinner you are, I’d love the season.

I don’t like thinking about my sins. They show me to be somebody other than the person I imagine I am; they tell me truths I don’t want to hear.

“Spiritual growth” sounds good; it sounds good for you, like the vegetarian plate at a steak house. The idea of spiritual growth is popular. Except for books about sultry teenage vampires, the majority of top-selling books on Amazon last year had to do with “spirituality.” It’s popular. “If you want the rainbow, you must put up with the rain,” or “As the purse is emptied the heart is filled,” or this banal insight: “Our first and last love...is self love.” We easily take to truths not worth considering.

The reason we keep “doing” Lent is it tells the truths we don’t want to consider but need to hear—indeed, to “learn, mark, hear and inwardly digest.” I dislike Lent because I don’t like its truth: I sin because I like to, and if I’m gonna stop sinning it’s not gonna be fun.

Abba Elias the priest (a member of a notoriously “unfun” profession) said, “To find joy, lament.” That sounds like something a priest would say. “Sorrow is fun.”

His gloomy words, though, mean just the opposite. If we want to find deep-seated joy, abiding joy, the kind that lasts, face who you are. Only when I come to terms with myself, not as a hopelessly lost sinner dangling over the eternal fiery pit, “a sinner in the hands of an angry god,” but as one of God’s creations who loves to sin but wants to love God too, only then can I begin to lay the foundation for joy.

Joy isn’t what you feel when you close the Big Deal or pick up your new truck. Those good feelings fade. Joy endures, because it’s not grounded on my emotions or my thoughts—or me, for that matter. Joy, the certainty that I’m in God’s hands and whatever comes is a sign of His love, only sin can shake.

That’s why sin is bad, that’s why we need Lent. The somber truth of Lent, the one I’m tired of hearing, is that I’m a sinner. The truth I don’t often grasp is why it matters. The most fundamental truth of Lent is not that I’m a sinner, but that sin holds me back from what I really want. Lent promises there is Something Better. “In His presence,” David sang, “is the fullness of joy.”

“Lament your sins,” Abba Elias cajoles us, “and find your Joy.”

Lent isn’t best kept with long faces but eager eyes, looking beyond sin to the Hope it hides.

A SELFISH GOD

A brother came to Abba Mark and said, “Afflictions and sorrows have come on me in times of joy, stealing God’s grace and unsettling my prayer. What can I do?” The old man said, “Each thing comes to us in the right time. God’s Grace is not a possession but a gift He gives of Himself. Your prayer, made when you are at peace or when you are troubled, is the gift you give to Him.”—from Words of the Desert Fathers

“Bad things come in threes.” I’ve heard that since I was a boy. I’ve also heard “When it rains, it pours.” We count blessings individually, but problems and sorrows by the bushel basket.

It’s not because God doles out good things by the thimbleful, but because we’re surrounded by so many good things we become blind to them. It’s not the girl’s beautiful face we remember but the mole on her neck. Our childhood delight in birthdays becomes an adult certainty we don’t have many more of these left. Pre-nuptial eagerness fades to the seven-year itch.

“Everything comes to us at the right time,” Abba Mark says. Perhaps we’re not too impertinent if we ask “The right time for what?”

When is the right time for sorrow or pain? When’s the right time for cancer? For $5.00 a gallon gasoline? I need money for my son’s tuition now, but money’s tight. Is this the right time?

Given my druthers, the time I choose for sorrow and suffering, for disappointment and tears is—never. The world of my choosing is one where I’m Emperor of Byzantium, surrounded by golden domes, beautiful women and philosophers of intricate wisdom.

The world I would create would be intolerable for you and everybody else. That’s because I’m selfish to the core (of course, I’d be no more interested in living in the world you’d create than you would in mine, for the same reason—I wouldn’t be in the center of it).

The world each of us would create would be intolerable because it would be a world of spoiled brats: a world much in need of a Flood to wash clean its face.

Joys and sorrows come not when we choose but “in the right time.” In God’s time.

They come to build His Grace in us, to make us His own. That’s why we’re here. God doesn’t care about my Byzantine fantasies or Warren Buffett’s financial empire. He cares about whether you and I—and Warren—are willing to give ourselves up. He wants us to hand our lives over to Him. And He’ll allow sorrow to shake us to the core if that’s what it takes to get our attention.

Is God that Self-centered?

That’s the conclusion a lot of us come to. “Eat, drink, and be merry, because someday He’s gonna leave you a broken cripple breathing through tubes.”

It’s easy to understand that point of view—it’s one we share every time we sin. God isn’t going to give me what I want—so I better grab it while I can.

Is God that Self-centered?

“In the right time,” in God’s Time—in the fullness of time—God came down. He gave Himself up to us as He now asks us to give ourselves up to Him. We tortured Him and killed Him, just like we sometimes do to each other. What came out of Him wasn’t self-centered bitterness, but Love. He gave Himself up and showed us what Love looks like in this fallen world.

What is the “right time” for sorrow? When God knows I'm ready to be dropped into the cauldron of His Love.

WHY?

“Abba Anthony pondered the depth of the judgments of God and asked, ‘Lord, how is it that some die when they are young, while others continue on to old age? Why are some poor and some rich? Why do the wicked prosper and the just suffer?’ He heard a voice answer him, ‘Anthony, attend to yourself; these things are in the keeping of God. What you do not know, you do not need to know.' ”—from The Lives of the Desert Fathers

We’ve all asked these questions.

Sometimes we ask them out of mere curiosity. It’s not fair when bad things happen to good people. When we ponder why the theoretical Mack truck runs over the theoretical little girl crossing the street with her grandmother, the injustice makes us wonder about God’s goodness.

Sometimes we ask them because something bad has happened to us, we hurt, and there’s nobody else to blame. If my boss fires me, I can blame him. If I finally accept that my daughter’s an alcoholic, I can blame her. If I get caught taking home a boxload of office supplies from work, I can blame everybody else ‘cause everybody else does it, too.

But when something bad happens—when it just seems to fall from the sky and hits me—then I start to wonder why this is happening to me. Why have I been singled out? What sort of God does such things?

It’s one thing to wonder why babies are born with cleft palates. It’s another question entirely when MY baby is born with a cleft palate. That’s when we simmer at injustice.

We’re right to simmer. The voice inside that asks “Why would a God Who is supposed to love me allow Alzheimer’s to steal my memories?” asks a question that should be asked. It’s not wrong for us to put hard questions—gut questions—to God.

If we really want to ask the tough questions, don’t take the cheap answers.

We ask these questions because we know something’s not right—a world where a happy college girl gets raped is a world that has something fundamentally wrong with it. So it’s not enough to say “some people are rapists,” or “she shouldn’t have gone out walking alone after dark,” though both these things may be factually true. They don’t answer the soul’s cry—“Why did I get raped?”

Abba Anthony put the question before God. “Why injustice? Why pain? Why sorrow? Why death? Why, Lord?”

In a sharp response, the Lord replied, “Attend to yourself.”

Did the Lord avoid Anthony’s question? Does He avoid yours? Because it’s a question every person, smart or stupid, kind or bitter, good or bad, has asked—and not one of us, ever—has received an answer that allows us to explain it to everybody else. It remains THE unanswered question about life, though it’s asked in a million different ways.

There’s no answer that will satisfy the mind, because at its roots, it’s not an intellectual question. It’s a question not so much of the mind but of the heart. Not “why?” but “why me?” “why the one I love?”

The Voice said to Anthony, “These things are in the keeping of God. What you don’t know, you don’t need to know.” That’s the harsh Voice of the desert. But there’s the other side of those words: “What you need to know, you know already.”

To find what you seek, look inside. Ponder your life. Discover God there. Hidden in harshness is mercy; coursing through pain, is Grace. “Attend to yourself.” God waits there.

GOBBLING THE GOAT

“When the brothers came to Abba Mark to confess their sins, one said, ‘I have no great sins, Father. I have murdered no one, I have stolen nothing, neither have I committed fornications. All my sins are small ones.’ The old man replied, ‘The devil belittles our small sins so he can lead us on to greater ones. If I violate my fast eating a single pea secretly, someday I will violate it by eating a whole goat.’ ”-from The Sayings of Abba Mark the Greek

The devil doesn’t advertise. He does his best business on the sly, cut-rate, at bargain prices. He’d prefer it if we didn’t even realize who we were doing business with.

Hell isn’t principally peopled with Adolf Hitler, Don Juan and Caesar Borgia, but with the countless, nameless souls who came cheap, who traded eternity for trash. Mothers who teach their children to steal, husbands who abandon their vows for a new red sports car and a twenty-two year old floozy, the accountant who builds a business by shifting figures, the manager who browbeats employees just because he can. It’s not so much the Great Sins which damn us but the smaller ones we take for granted; the ones we think don’t matter, the ones we tell ourselves aren’t really sins at all. Most of us go to hell by baby steps, not giant leaps.

St Teresa of Avila, that wonderful Spanish woman with whom Someday I hope to spend an afternoon, says “God only shows us our sins as much as we can bear them.” If we could see into the cob-web corners of our souls, we might be driven to despair. “My own heart,” the Psalmist says, “shows me the wickedness of the ungodly.” I don’t need to look elsewhere for why the world is in the sorry shape it’s in. A mirror will suffice. I’m already eating the goat.

Abba Mark, like St Teresa, says that the sins we see are the ones we should deal with. Don’t worry about what you don’t know. Deal with what you do know and let God worry about the rest.

Fighting sin seems scary because we don’t know how to do it. We don’t do it by trying real hard not to sin, by trying to think about something else, by taking a whole lot of cold showers.

We do it without drama, without trumpets, in the secret place of the heart where temptation is trying to insinuate itself. We pray.

No temptation can overcome prayer. If we call on the Lord Christ, saying no more than “Jesus, help me,” He will. The problem isn’t that He won’t hear my prayer—it’s that I don’t want to pray in the first place. I don’t want His help—or interference. I may even tell myself “I can do this myself.”

Every time I do, I end up eating the goat. That’s because—even when I resist temptation by my own will-power (which any of us can do under the right circumstances)—all I’ve done is pushed aside a small sin to embrace a greater one. I, Me, by Myself, I turned aside the temptation to steal—I did it Myself. I resisted the pea of thievery to gobble the goat of pride.

Our spiritual lives succeed not when we win victories over the devil, but when we surrender to God.

We don’t have to beat back all the snarling hosts of Satan—as the matter of fact, we can’t. That’s God’s job. Ours is to find our place under His banner, put on the armor of prayer, and follow where we’re led.

HOW TO SET OTHERS STRAIGHT

A monk asked Abba Mark the Greek, “If I see one of the brothers do something contrary to what is right, what should I do?" The old man said, “Be careful that your concern is according to God; before all, that you take no pleasure in his sin or correction. To speak of his sin to others is far from the Gospel; to speak to him alone is to obey the Gospel law; to speak to him of his sin not at all, but to cry to God on his behalf—this is the work of angels."—from The Sayings of the Desert Fathers

As soon as God dusted His hands off after making Adam, Scripture says He thought “It’s not good for man to be alone.” He took some more dirt and formed Eve, plucked out one of Adam’s ribs, and began the human race.

This story from Holy Writ is meant to tell us more than how we came to be men and women. That rib tells us we’re part of each other in the most basic of ways. The ancient story of God’s breathing life into a man and woman from whom we all come may seem quaint, but only a few decades ago geneticists made an identical claim—less poetic than Genesis—but pointing to the same truth. Australian aborigine, Louisiana Cajun and Boston socialite, we’re part of each other, linked at the most basic levels by our Creator Himself.

That genetic truth isn’t the point of the Bible story. “It’s not good for man to be alone,” means “It’s good for us to be with someone.” We need each other.

As much as I may think I don’t, I need you. Without my parents, I would have no existence. Without my teachers, I’d have no knowledge. Without my family and friends, I would have no love. God made us to be with each other and we need each other in ways we don’t understand.


Our word intercession comes from Latin; it means “to stand between,” to act on behalf of someone else. Intercessory prayer is what we do when we pray for each other. If I ask you to pray for me, I’m asking you to be my intercessor. I’m asking you “to stand between” God and me, to pray on my behalf.

We can fulfill such a request by saying the person’s name to God. Christians for many centuries have kept lists of names, families and friends, sometimes even people they’ve never met, people living and dead, which they regularly say before God. We bring such names to Mass and fulfill out duties as intercessors for those we’ve been asked to remember. Such remembrances rise to Heaven like fine incense.

Intercession, though, isn’t just rattling names off a list. The monk asked Abba Mark what to do when he saw someone misbehave. “What am I bound to do for my brother?”

First Abba Mark tells him what not to do. Don’t delight—even secretly—in his sin. Don’t be glad you’re better, because you aren’t; your sins may not be the same, but they’re just as deadly. When I talk to you about somebody else’s sins, I’m letting you know I’m better than them.

Speak to the sinner privately, if you must, Abba says. You evidently think you have something of value to say.

But he suggests a higher way. Become their intercessor. Stand between the person and his sin before God. This is what Christ does—He is, St Paul says, “the Mediator between God and men.”

We’re not competent to be judges of each other—our knowledge is incomplete and our hearts imperfect. The world has enough judges. But we can be intercessors, pleading the case of others before the All-Just Judge. In so doing, we can open the gates of mercy and Grace into the lives of others—and be ourselves drawn deep into the Heart of God.

"ONLY LET THEM BE TRUE"

“Some of the brothers went to Abba Macarius and said, ‘How should we pray?’ He answered, ‘It is not necessary to say many words, only let them be true. Turn your face to God and say “As You will, Lord, do to me. As You do, let me follow.” This is prayer.’ ”—from the Sayings of Abba Macarius

“Only let them be true.”

God knows who I am. He doesn’t have to wonder about it, I never puzzle Him, He knows me as I can never know myself. The problem I have with praying is me. It’s not so much that I don’t say the truth to God, as it is I don’t say the truth to myself.

I don’t say it because I don’t know it—or don’t want to own up to it.

As soon as my prayer moves beyond a childish “gimme, gimme, gimme,” I bump into a problem. It’s theological. Who am I praying to? Who is God? What’s He like?

One of the Commandments, etched by the fiery Finger of God onto the stone tablet, says “Thou shalt have no other gods but Me.” The more we learn about God, however, the more we’re inclined to trade Him in for another. Much of the story of the Old Testament is how the Jews kept turning from the God Who chose them to gods they chose for themselves. Those stories from long ago still ring true when they’re read among us today, because we still do the same thing.

When I pray, what I believe about God, who I think He is, will determine how I pray. If I think God is Santa Claus, I’ll tell him how good I’ve been and how deserving I am of the things I want. If I think God is a high school principal, I’ll try to keep the rules, remembering the long paddle that hangs outside his office. If I think He’s like “the Force” in Star Wars, an impersonal Power that generally oversees things, then I’ll try to be philosophical about everything and my “prayer” will be a vague sort of “hoping for the best.”

Who God is matters very much for a very practical reason: Who He Is determines who I am.

Those who find God in the Testaments lay aside all other gods. The One Who burned his words onto the Tablets at Sinai looks to write His words on our hearts. Prayer is us telling Him whether or not we’re willing to let Him do it.

Abba Macarius says, “Not many words, only let them be true.”

We learn from Scripture that God usually speaks to us, not in words we hear with our ears, but with words so subtle they can be discerned only with the mind and heart. Prayer isn’t prattling. I can prattle at God, but just saying words isn’t speaking. It’s reciting a monologue. “Let them be true.”

Prayer isn’t me flattering God (Whose angels see Him as He Is and forever cry “Holy, Holy, Holy” because in His Presence, there’s nothing else to say); nor is it me demeaning myself. It’s me saying to God who I am, warts and all, and God revealing to me Who He Is, as much as I can bear to know (which isn’t very much, but as much as He reveals it’s always more than I can take in).

To the extent I tell God the truth about myself, to that degree will I grasp the Truth about Himself He whispers to me. We will become friends.

When that happens, as happens to us when we find that rare true friend here, the day will come when silence is more eloquent than speech. I begin to see: prayer isn’t about asking but giving.

THE GOD OF THE DESERT

“One of the brothers asked Abba Daniel, ‘What shall I do, father, for I am not acting like a monk at all. I eat, drink, and sleep carelessly, I have evil thoughts and when I say my prayers my mind wanders from one thing to another. I came to the desert but remain a worldling and will never know the peace of the fathers here.’ The old man said, ‘Sit in your cell and do what little you can do untroubled. By remaining in your cell for the name of God, and guarding your conscience, you will find the same peace Abba Anthony has.’ "-from The Lives of the Desert Fathers

For years I lived in the desert of southwest Texas. I was a Boy Scout there. While other boys scaled the mist-shrouded heights of Pike’s Peak and explored the rocky coastlines of Maine, my troop went on desert hikes. Others remember tracking animals through thick forests or setting up camp in view of Crater Lake. The most notable day of my scouting career was when our troop was, to a man (or “to a boy” I guess), routed by a pack of angry and ugly javelina hogs. I don’t like the desert.

The desert doesn’t compromise, doesn’t yield; it’s harsh and hot by day and harsh and cold by night. The abbas and ammas who went into the desert (and they still go there, today) went because it’s harsh and unyielding. They didn’t want compromises, they weren’t interested in balancing the various aspects of their lives; they went to find, amid the blistering rocks and waiting scorpions, the Fire that burns everything unnecessary from the soul.

For all the several score of famous saints whose holiness was hammered out on the desert’s anvil, there were countless thousands whose lives consisted, not of heavenly visions and demonic temptations, but of plodding, daily, unexciting virtue.

Abba Daniel received one such. “I don’t act like a monk at all,” he moaned. “I came to the desert to be like Abba Anthony but I behave more like my cousin Joey in Cairo.”

The knowing abba replied, “You have a place to be: be there. You have things to do: do them. Be there and do them in the Name of God, and God will see. Persevere in what you can do, and God will give you the peace you seek.”

A kind verse in the Psalms says: “He knows whereof we are made; He remembers that we are but dust.”

You and I may believe we’ve achieved some knowledge of God and spiritual insight in our lives, but most of what we think we know is illusory. The truths about God aren’t found on the backs of cereal boxes or in cute internet stories.

God isn’t an indulgent uncle who slips us a C-note now and then, saying “Go out and have a good time.” He’s God of the harsh desert, Who burns and scalds and hammers our souls out on His anvil of love—if we have the guts for it. But He’s the God of rushing mountain rivers and gentle spring breezes, too. “He remembers we are but dust.”

Sometimes you and I can follow Him for forty days into the desert, imitating Jesus, squaring off against temptations. Other times, we just need to be where we are, doing what we do, like the nameless monk. When we pick up the kids and cook supper and wash the clothes for Jesus’ sake, there is in that a reward. Not the fiery reward of the desert (that will come later), but it turns out “the Peace of God, which passeth all understanding ,” isn’t a reward at all. It's a Gift, coming from the Lover of Mankind, to all who look to find it, plod they never so slowly.