Joy in Lent, joy in life

Lent is something of a proving ground. Because love is demonstrated not in sentiment or feeling but in what we are willing to sacrifice for our beloved, as I heard in a recent homily, the way in which we practice penances during this liturgical season can provide us with a sobering status check.

How we are (or are not!) able to live out self-denial during Lent probably indicates something about our capacity for sacrificial love during the rest of the year, too.

But I’d suggest Lent is also an opportunity for insight into how we live out another central aspect of the Christian life: joy.

Laetare Sunday, in particular, is a moment for such reflection. The fourth Sunday of Lent (March 14 this year) takes its name from the first few words of the traditional Latin introit: Laetare Jerusalem. “Rejoice, O Jerusalem!” And the Church does rejoice, at least in comparison to our normal Lenten somberness: rose-colored vestments are worn instead of the usual violet, and flowers are allowed to adorn the typically stark Lenten altar.

But why is Laetare Sunday an opportunity to rejoice? On one level, we can view it as a kind of Lenten “hump day,” a reminder that the brunt of the fasting and self-sacrifice is over, and that Easter is finally in sight. In fact, another name for the day is “mid-Lent Sunday.” From this perspective, we rejoice on Laetare Sunday precisely because Lent is almost over, and the “reward” of Easter is right around the corner, if only we continue to pay the “cost” of penance and fasting.

This perspective, though, misses out on a much deeper cause for joy. Although our Easter celebration may be weeks away, the original Easter, Christ’s redemptive death and resurrection, has already taken place. The “light came into the world,” as we hear in the Gospel reading for Laetare Sunday (Jn 3:14-21). God has already redeemed our humanity, he has already definitively defeated sin and death, and because of this, we can experience joy now, the joy of being united to Christ, even in the midst of our Lenten discomfort and hunger pangs.

This joy will certainly culminate on Easter Sunday, but we can — in fact, we must — begin to live it now. How will our Lenten penances be fruitful if we do them apart from Christ? And what causes joy if not being with the One we love? It’s a point St. Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274) makes in his “Summa Theologiae” (ST II-II, q. 28), reminding us that Christ “is present to those who love him, by the indwelling of his grace.”

As this goes for Lent, so it goes for all of life. Far too often, the Christian life is portrayed as one of merely stoic endurance, putting up with a life of suffering and pain, following a set of difficult and even arbitrary rules, all so that we can survive this life and receive the reward of heaven.

This view reduces grace to a mere aid in escaping, denying that we truly and actually participate in the life of God now. It reduces morality to something foreign to and imposed upon our nature, instead of the way of living in freedom in our current state. And it reduces joy to merely the intoxicating sentiments of an escapist fantasy, ignoring that we are already tasting what we will receive in full.

As the theologian and Jesuit priest Henri de Lubac (1896-1991) said, Christ “came to deliver us from time, but by means of time.” This is the law of the Incarnation. Our journey in this life cannot be disconnected from our eternal destiny, and the factor that links the two together is the love of God. Because of our imperfections and the limitations of a fallen, created world, we do not experience this love now with the radical, infinite fullness with which we will in heaven. Even so, we are experiencing the same Divine Love. It is both already, and not yet.

Quite frankly, if God cannot be with me now in the midst of my hardships, brokenness and confusion, then he is not God, and is not worthy of my worship. If he is incapable of being with me as I walk through this valley of tears, then why should I expect his love to satisfy me for all eternity?

Of course, God is truly with us now, not merely waiting for us in heaven. He is especially present to us in our sufferings. In fact, as Jesuit Father George Aschenbrenner, the rector of the Jesuit community at the University of Scranton, Pennsylvania, noted, “The cross is the privileged place of union with the Father” — the place where we are stripped bare of everything except the foundational fact that God loves us, and is with us. And that is the source of our joy, in Lent and in life.

Liedl lives and writes in the Twin Cities.