The Christian life is about the love affair between God and man. I see every aspect of our Faith as either contributing to the relationship of love between me and Our Lord or detracting from it. If I'm right about this, I'm going to look at Lent a little differently this year. I invite you to join me.
One of the great differences between Christianity and other religions is that for us, God is a Person, not a thing. (Yes, persons are things, but I'm speaking plainly here.) As a person, He treats us like persons and invites us to treat Him like a Person.
For instance, when Christians pray, we don't empty the mind; we fill it with God. Although through prayer and study, we can seek enlightenment, we don't attribute that enlightenment to the total negation of the self. Some religions propose that the self be absorbed into a kind of universal oneness of being. They may be right in a certain respect, namely that all things that have being are somehow united, but they seriously miss the boat when they believe that self-abnegation requires the destruction of the self.
In Christian thought, we lose ourselves in God only to discover that we are truly free and unique and that uniqueness is honored even by God himself.
I think this uniqueness of personhood is reflected in our prayer life. Our Savior wants to establish open lines of communication with us, speaking with us in intimate communion all the time. We see this in St. Teresa of Jesus's prayer. When she was travelling and her cart broke down in a rut of mud on a dingy road, she appealed to Our Lord and complained about her travails. She heard Jesus answer her in something of these words, "Don't you know this is how I treat all my friends?" Her response, borne of a life of intimate union with God was, in modern terms, snarky: "No wonder you have so few of them."
I love this story because it shows how Teresa's relationship with her Divine and Blessed Savior did not stop her from speaking her mind and being herself. Moreover, her relationship with Our Lord made her more herself.
When I think of my human relationships and my friendships over the years, I think about the number of times that I've realized that I was doing something that harmed my relationship with a friend. In my better friendships, I've been able to have a conversation about what I did wrong and what I could do better.
Sometimes our friends ask us to change our behavior for just a little while, or to practice impulse control for one thing. I have a fairly caustic sense of humor at times, and I've had friends say things like, "That's not funny now." or "I know you'll want to make a joke about this, but please save it for later." In my better moments, I honor their request. In my not-so-better moments, I don't.
At other times I've done things that actively frustrate my friendship and have been called to task. One of these times I remember clearly is when my best friend called me to task for speaking negatively to him in a joking manner. He said, "Let's not base our friendship on mock spite." It was an amazing conversation and a lot of the reason that we're still friends today. I'm thankful that he corrected me and I'm especially thankful that I took the correction and changed my behavior.
I think Our Lord identifies two kinds of things that we can do during Lent to improve our friendship with Him: Things that we deny ourselves for a time to show our love for Him, and other things that we try to give up for good.
This Lenten Season, I'm trying to look at the idea of a seasonal penance a little bit differently than in years past and try to phrase it in the context of my friendship with my Lord: Does Our Lord think I need to give up for good and what little things can I deny myself so that I show more clearly a deeper manifestation of my love.
I pray for the insight to change my behavior in such a way that I can deepen my friendship with Our Lord. I open myself up to His grace and I'm receptive to allowing His healing hands fashion my life.
