What’s the point of all these penances? Well, in fact, they’re pointless – on their own, that is! With faith, however, all our Lent penances acquire a special power. Why do Christians fast? The name gives it away: we fast because Christ fasted. When you fast with faith, you are really, spiritually with Christ in the desert. John Henry Newman, in a sermon on Lent, speaks of how, alone, we are as powerless as water or bread, but that, just as these mundane things become supernatural in the sacraments of baptism and the Eucharist, so our penances become supernaturally powerful when we do them ‘in Christ’ – that is, with Jesus in view as our goal, asking Him to make our fasting His own, and His fasting our own.
Lent is sometimes called the springtime of souls, because it’s a fresh start for both the plants and ourselves”
Penances also withdraw us from the world to some extent. They had a real brainwave during the Middle Ages: since the entire population was Catholic, they went ahead and banned, not only sports hunting and theatre plays, but also lawsuits during Lent, and even wars! The purpose was to give people time to reflect – Lent is, after all, supposed to be something like an extended retreat. Jesus’ 40 days of fasting were foreshadowed by the 40 days of prayer and fasting that Moses and Elijah did in the Old Testament – resulting in both cases in a decisive meeting with God on the holy mountain. Experience shows that even in modern times something similarly dramatic happens to us, if we take the much-needed break from busyness, step back, and turn to God. We can see how beneficial this is by looking at how many people seem to have had spiritual awakenings during the coronavirus lockdown, when they were forced to sit still. For some, like for Moses and Elijah, the resulting meeting with God changed the whole course of their life.
Again, all our penitential acts on their own are pointless without ‘interior penance’ – that is, we must do it for the right motive, out of love for God. If you love someone, you’re willing to change for them – think how in a relationship you put the other’s preferences before your own. Penance is the virtue of being willing to change. Newman said, “To live is to change, and to be perfect is to have changed often”; and John Paul II’s message for us people of Ireland, still written on the plaque by the papal cross, was: “May you convert every day” – this means starting all over again, and turning to Christ on the inside as if it was for the first time, putting your past yet again behind you, and quitting all the little (or big!) sins that drag you down. Lent is sometimes called the springtime of souls, because it’s a fresh start for both the plants and ourselves.
Habits
So, you can look at Lent as a time to build habits which you’ll keep even after Easter – not just for self-improvement, but habits which make you live more closely with the person you live with – ie. God! For example, getting up a bit earlier to spend some time with your loved one before work – that’s prayer! Or quitting those little habits that annoy them- aka. your sins!
So, true penance is about love. If we love someone, we’re pained when we realise we’ve done them an offence. Our own penances, Catherine of Siena says, have “infinite merit” when we do them with “infinite displeasure” for sins committed and sorrow towards God. We can do this, though, not just for our own sins but even for another person’s too, so that our prayers ‘constrain God’, and He starts acting quite forthrightly in that person’s life to undo their sins and heal their wounds. If someone you love is going in a bad direction, Lent is a good time to do penance for them in the trust that God will intervene in their life because of what you do now. In fact, offering up your penances for someone you care about makes the penance a lot easier to do too!
It’s not too late to be daring and take up one of these, offering it to God for someone we love”
So, with only two full weeks before Easter, what can we do? Like a race, the best time to put in our biggest effort is near the end. St Josemaria says that penance is to be found in little everyday efforts – accepting inconveniences cheerfully, sticking to your timetable of work and prayer, being very kind to people you find annoying, and the like. For one year, my penance was to be cheerful, and that unsurprisingly turned out to be a very enjoyable Lent. Another possibility is the ‘tech fast’ – one thing I’ve learned this year is just how difficult everyone finds it to give up YouTube! Lots of people also turn their phone screen to colourless ‘greyscale’ so that it becomes less addictive, and I’ve found this helpful too. But lest you think that the ‘big penances’ of the good old days are dead and gone, take a look at the ‘Exodus 90’ challenge, featuring the iconic ‘cold showers for Lent’ penance, the most feared penance of all.
So for the final sprint of Lent, especially for Holy Week, it’s not too late to be daring and take up one of these, offering it to God for someone we love – God won’t let it go to waste!
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God be with the days of black tea with bread and dripping! Today, almost no religious group fasts less than Catholics. More and more research shows that fasting has big health benefits, from reducing the effects of aging to combatting cancer! But the spiritual benefits are even better – yet another example that what’s good for your soul turns out to be good for your body too. In earlier times, Christians fasted quite impressively for Lent, so perhaps it’s high time we rediscovered some of those big penances of yesteryear, the kind our great grandparents and their great grandparents did, and which Eastern Orthodox Christians still carry out to this day!
For starters, in the good old days, on Ash Wednesday and Good Friday you would do a ‘black fast’, which quite simply means eating nothing at all for the whole day, and drinking nothing too. I can tell you, a pint of water never tasted so good as after one of these!
But this was only the beginning: during Lent, every day was a fast day! At first, there was no food eaten until 3pm, the time of Christ’s death on the cross, but this was later shortened to 12pm for the sake of monks doing manual labour; after that, you had one small snack or ‘collation’ before bed to look forward to. No animal meats or fats, no eggs, no dairy products were allowed – even on Sundays! As for drinks, the menu consisted of water and watery beer, and later tea and coffee too – but no milk or sugar. It was a diet of bread and vegetables – and no vegetables during Holy Week. To round it all off, you’d finish your marathon with a good long fast from Holy Thursday evening until the Easter Vigil (which used to be as early as noon on Holy Saturday). God be with the days!
