Tag Archives: Gregory the Great

Make Lent Hard Again

Fasting, Lent, Prayer, , , ,

In an age afflicted by ecclesial bar lowering, there is always a great danger that the inherent rhythm in the liturgical year will lose its meaning.  This is perhaps most true when it comes to the season of Lent.  Lent “officially” begins on Sunday, but Pope St. Gregory the Great added the four days between Ash Wednesday and the First Sunday in order to add four extra days so that the Faithful would fast for a total of forty days between Ash Wednesday and Holy Thursday (Sundays and the two Solemnities of St. Joseph and the Annunciation being days to relax the fasting).  In other words, unlike in our own times where we are required to fast two days during Lent, the great Pope wanted to raise the bar and make it harder!  It is in this spirit that we should all resolve to make this our hardest Lent ever.

A Harder Lent?

Now admittedly, Gregory the Great was not simply trying to make it harder, even if that was one of the side effects.  Instead, he was adjusting it so that Lent would retain its meaning.  He wanted us, day by day, to join Our Lord in the desert during His great fast.  Our Lord, true God and true Man, merited specific graces for each one of us individually each day that He fasted and fought in the desert.  Lent is meant to be the time when we receive those graces, but our Lord asks us to meet Him in order for Him to give them to us. 

It was no accident that Our Lord chose 40 days.  Whether it is the forty days and nights of rain during the Flood, the Forty Years spent wandering in the desert, or the 40 days by which Ezekiel had to lay on his side, forty is the number of punishment and affliction.  It is also the number of reparation with both Moses and Elijah joining Our Lord in reparatory fasting for 40 days.  It turns out, although not surprisingly, that forty is also the magic number for developing a new habit.  It is as if forty days of affliction and reparation is written into our fallen nature. 

Because Christ first instituted Lent in the desert, it has all the qualities of a Christian mystery.  And like all Christian mysteries it was instituted in order to bestow grace upon us.  It is like a sacrament, or better yet, a sacramental.  A sacred sign that is given to us that disposes us to receive grace.  Living out a true Lenten spirit disposes us to receive those graces Our Lord wants to give us.  Prayer, fasting and almsgiving take on a sacramental meaning, but especially fasting.  The emphasis of Lent is on fasting for good reason—Our Lord sanctified and weaponized it in the desert.  Lent is meant to be 40 days of hard fasting in reparation for our sins and growth in virtue. 

Lent Began Well, Ends Well

Another key component of Lent is the reception of ashes on Ash Wednesday.  This is not, as many think, because it is only a symbol of our sinfulness and need for Penance, but because it is a Sacramental that, when received in faith, disposes us to the necessary graces to live a hard Lent.  This disposal happens through the prayer of the Blessing of the Ashes.  One of the prayers of blessing in the Novus Ordo Mass says:

O God, who desire not the death of sinners, but their conversion, mercifully hear our prayers and in your kindness be pleased to bless + these ashes which we intend to receive upon our heads, that we, who acknowledge we are but ashes and shall return to dust, may, through a steadfast observance of Lent, gain pardon for sins and newness of life after the likeness of your Risen Son. Who lives and reigns for ever and ever.

As I have spoken of previously, the power of Sacramentals come through their actual blessing and so we must, in order to properly take advantage of them, pay attention to what they have been empowered to do.  The ashes in particular then are true Sacramentals that, through the power of the Church, dispose us to receive all the graces necessary to have a “steadfast observance of Lent” and “gain the pardon of sins.”  By receiving the ashes, we are each individually guaranteed to receive the prayers of the Mystical Body that we can live a hard Lent.

As an aside, Ashes are a prime example of why the blessings from the Tridentine Rite are far superior to those of the Novus Ordo.  As a side-by-side comparison, take a look at the prayers.  The former clearly gives a more abundant blessing upon the ashes, rendering them far more powerful to aid us during Lent.   This is not a shot across the post-Vatican II bow, but a comment that, objectively speaking, the Church was far more generous in bestowing blessings upon the Faithful in the pre-Vatican II era.

Either way, armed by Our Lord in the desert and further disposed by the Ashes, we have everything we need to live a hard Lent.  What if each one of us, rather than measuring out “what we will give up”, went “old school” and fasted for these 40 days.  I have found that Dr. Jay Richard’s method detailed in his book is particularly effective for growing in the virtue of fasting and implementing as a daily practice in Lent.  Recalling that one of the reasons why the Church had so many fast days previously was so that we could develop the virtue of fasting, we may have to start at a level that is proportional to our current level of virtue.  But by the end of Lent we should all have developed the virtue and that only comes about through making it hard.

The “Great Bar Lowering” then must be met by a voluntary raising of our own bars.  Genuine contrition of soul can never be achieved without mortification of the body.  We are both body and soul and any attempt to separate the two in practice leads to great harm to our persons.  A hard Lent, fasting especially, will create in us a disposition of sorrow for our sins and a generosity of spirit in making reparation to Our Lord.  It is as if the diminishing of our physical energy brings about a supernatural energy.  Make Lent Hard Again!

The Tyranny of the Hopeless

End of Life, Grace, Heaven, Last Things, Virtue, , , , , , ,

Around the year 251, the Roman Empire began to be ravaged by a plague.  Historians estimate that up to 5000 people died per day in Rome alone.  As Eusebius recounts, the pagans of Rome ran, quite literally, for their lives, shunning “any participation or fellowship with death; which yet, with all their precautions, it was not easy for them to escape” (Book VII, Ch. 22).  It was the Christians that stepped forward and were “unsparing in their exceeding love and brotherly kindness. They held fast to each other and visited the sick fearlessly, and ministered to them continually, serving them in Christ. And they died with them most joyfully, taking the affliction of others, and drawing the sickness from their neighbors to themselves and willingly receiving their pains. And many who cared for the sick and gave strength to others died themselves having transferred to themselves their death…Truly the best of our brethren departed from life in this manner, including some presbyters and deacons and those of the people who had the highest reputation; so that this form of death, through the great piety and strong faith it exhibited, seemed to lack nothing of martyrdom” (ibid).  Despite being viewed as the scourge of the Roman Empire, the Christians were the only ones who stepped forward when Rome was scourged.  This event was no historical accident but instead a blueprint for how Christians should respond in a time of plague.  Throughout history, we find similar responses.  Whether it was Justinian’s Plague of the late 6th Century plague in Rome that Pope St. Gregory expelled with some help from St. Michael and friends or the Black Death in which the mortality rate for priests was 47%, the Church has always viewed plagues as a time to let her light shine before men.

One might be quick to dismiss these historical precedents as irrelevant to our own times.  Society is structured such that plagues and their treatment are very different.  Christians are no longer needed to be de facto First Responders.  The State provides those.  Instead Christians should get out of the way and let the professionals do their job.  It is time to put said light under the bushel basket so that the contagion not spread.  But this would be a misreading of the events and a misunderstanding of what it means to be a Christian.

The Christian Response

Playing armchair epidemiologists, we might comment that the Christians probably made the problem worse.  That many of them died along with the sick would naturally support this fact.  And herein lies the problem.  A natural reading of these events reveal them to be failures, but a supernatural reading of them changes everything.  It is precisely in times of calamity that Christians need to become supernatural storytellers, not primarily by their words, but in their actions.

What made the Christians during those catastrophes exemplars was not that they ran to the front lines and tended to the wounded, but that they were beacons of hope.  They were beacons of true hope, not the optimism of only “two more weeks” but the hope that says “death is not the end”.  The light that they shone was Christian hope, a light that enabled everyone in society to realize that dying well is the meaning of life.  They tended to the spiritual wounds, they were really a Field Hospital and they remained open. 

They didn’t just talk about Christian hope, but they showed it by their actions.  The difference between true Christians and those who are not comes down to one thing—fear of death.  It is the fear of death that keeps people trapped within the clutches of the devil.  But it is Christ Who “freed those who through fear of death had been subject to slavery all their life” (Hebrews 2:15).  Each one of the cornerstones upon which the Church has been built did not fear death and each stone that is added to the edifice is free from the same fear.  The Apostles had seen their Teacher and Lord die, but then He was alive.  Freed from death, He promised them the same power.  That was the basis of their hope and it was the source of their freedom to live for the Glory of God and the salvation of souls even if it cost them their lives.

The Cost of Hope

Like the Apostles and Martyrs, sometimes witnessing to hope cost the Christians living in the times of plague their lives.  That too was necessary because it testifies to the fact that the world can offer no fountain of youth, no immortality.  Still its inhabitants remain locked in fear of death.  Only the Christian is truly free from the fear of death and it is this that sets them apart.  But it wasn’t that they “visited the sick fearlessly, and ministered to them continually,” but also that they “held fast to each other.” 

In short, hope was made manifest by the fact that they continued to meet with each other.  They showed no fear of death because spiritual death is far worse.  The danger of spiritual death is ever-present, plague or not.  They met because they needed to constantly feed the hope that was in them.  Only a hopeless lot would give up the Sacraments or treat that only as a life insurance policy. 

You might think they were naïve, but they were far wiser than we; they knew that if Christians were going to rebuild society after the plague, they would need to build up the spiritual strength now.  They knew they would only build as reservoirs of grace, filling up society with the overflow of divine life they received from the Church and her Sacraments.  With greater knowledge they may have taken more precautions, but they would have ultimately thrown caution to the wind because of the value of a single soul. 

Living as we now do under, what Bishop Schneider has dubbed, the “dictatorship of the sanitary” the Church needs to shine forth as a beacon of hope.  What this might look like once prudent precautions are taken isn’t entirely clear, but it has been made abundantly clear both by history and the present moment what it wouldn’t look like.  When the Church responds exactly the same way the world does to a crisis then something is wrong.  The tyranny of the hopeless shuts down everything, the liberality of hope opens wide the doors.  Christians must be witnesses to hope, especially in ages such as we are living.

The Great Sin

Sin, Spiritual Life, Virtue, , ,

There is an unwritten rule in the Catholic blogosphere that if you want people to read your stuff, don’t include the word sin in the first twenty-two words.  There is also a written rule that you should not lie, so I will admit that I made that up in order to avoid jumping right into the topic of which few of us like to speak: sin.  More specifically, it has to do with what the Book of Sirach calls “the beginning of all sin” (Sir 10:13) or, what CS Lewis called the “one vice of which no man in the world is free; which everyone in the world loathes when he sees it in someone else; and of which hardly any people, except Christians, ever imagine that they are guilty themselves…There is no fault which makes a man more unpopular, and no fault which we are more unconscious of in ourselves.  The more we have of it in ourselves the more we dislike it in others” (Mere Christianity).  He, of course, is referring to the most destructive of the Seven Deadly Sins, pride.

The fact that we can easily perceive pride in others and not in ourselves is because we only, as Lewis says, “imagine” we are guilty of it ourselves.  We usually only have a vague sense we are plagued by it, but cannot see it clearly because we only know what it looks like exteriorly.  So we shun compliments and avoid things like bragging, but make little headway in actually overcoming it.  What we really need is a sketch of what it looks like interiorly; how it animates much of what we do.  For help on this we can turn to one of the oldest Doctors of the Church, St. Gregory the Great.  In his long book called The Morals of Job, he provides the blueprints of pride by separating it into four specific kinds.

The Four Species of Pride

Because of its clandestine character, it is first necessary to understand what pride is.  Pride is, according to St. Thomas, a disordered desire for excellence.  Notice that he doesn’t say it is the disorder of desiring excellence, but a disordered desire for excellence.  That means that there is an ordered desire for excellence meaning that in the human constitution there is a natural desire for excellence (c.f. 2Cor 10:13-17).  We are made with a desire for goodness, both material and spiritual, and therefore excellence is simply a measure of the amount of goods one possesses.  This awareness that we have a natural desire for excellence helps us to better understand why denying compliments or boasting is little more than a doggy paddle amidst the torrent of pride in our hearts.

This also helps to elucidate why it is so difficult to escape pride’s clutches.  Pride is a constitutive element of man’s fallen nature because it is the first sin.  In the case of both Lucifer and then Adam and Eve, their fall was because they sought an excellence that was disordered.  Both the fallen angels and fallen men sought to “be like God” even if their manner of approach was different.  “Pride goes before the fall” (Prov 16:18) is not just a psychological fact but also a historical one.  In trying to become “self-made” men raising ourselves from the pit in which we fell, pride is always looming.

What is Pride?

Returning to the teachings of Pope St. Gregory, we find that he assigns the four species of pride accordingly, “…either when they judge that they have their goodness from themselves, or when if they believe that their goodness has been given to them from above, they think that they have received it because of their merits, or surely when they boast that they have what they do not have, or when, despising others, they desire to appear to have in a singular way what they have” (Morals of Job XXIII, 13).

The first species has to do with the source of our personal excellence, that is, we can judge that it comes from ourselves.  It is always true that excellence achieved without outside help is better than that which is received with help.  Thus the myth of the self-made man.  As Christians we acknowledge that “every good thing comes from above,” (James 1:17) and yet this species of pride has a subtle way of insinuating itself into our heart through what I would call “Christian pride.” So common is this Christian pride that it bears some unpacking to make it clearer.  I am not saying that being a Christian is not an excellence in which we should derive a form of healthy pride.  The snare comes when we see ourselves as better than others, rather than simply better off.

Can we honestly think that when so many of our contemporaries are blind to the truth that we somehow figured it because of our own sagacity?  The conflict with the culture can lead us to look down upon others seeing them as non-Christians rather than Christians to be.  It is hubris of this sort that turns many people away from Christianity.  “But for the grace of God go I” is more than a cute saying.  It is a foundational truth upon which humility is built.  Faith is a completely unmerited gift.  The teachings of the Church, especially in a time of moral turmoil are a gift.  The wisdom that enables us to see them as true is a gift.  The perseverance to remain steadfast too is a gift.

Closely related to this is the second species of pride by which we acknowledge the excellence as coming from above, but somehow see ourselves as meriting it.  In examining our hearts we can find this form in our attitude towards other people, especially in their sins.  All too often we demand justice for others and mercy for ourselves.  We look for ways to accuse others while excusing ourselves.  This is the competitive nature of pride, thinking excellence comes by knocking other people down a rung or two.  How often when someone suffers, even if it is self-imposed, do we think “they got what they deserved”?  But when we suffer, that thought never crosses our minds.

Pride also causes us to play a game of pretend by “boasting of what he has not.”  This is where we have developed a persona and thus do everything we can to keep that image up, usually causing great suffering while doing so.  This is a favorite one of Social Media users but also a particular problem in certain Catholic circles.  In attempting to present to the world an image of what they think a perfect Catholic should be like, they are ascribing to themselves an excellence they have not.  Truth be told, it is usually not even a true excellence.  The “perfect” Catholic family looks like a small army that is at war, each one conformed to Christ crucified.  That is usually not a pretty picture according to the standards of the world.

The competitive nature of pride also is the genesis of the fourth species of pride —“when a man despises others and wishes to be singularly conspicuous.”  This is the pride of the “most interesting man in the world,” or if you prefer a more biblical example, the Pharisee who thanked God he was not like the rest of humanity (Lk 18:9-14).  He had true excellences, fasting and tithing, but he was riddled by pride because he thought this made him “singularly conspicuous.”  This is the worst form of pride and is actually the sin of Lucifer himself.  This form of pride causes us to constantly need to put others down in order to make ourselves look better.  As the worst of the four types, it also results in the most serious myopathy.  The only barometer for how bad we have it is to ask how much we hate it when people snub us, don’t “respect” us, show off or patronize us.

Around the turn of the 20th Century, Cardinal Merry del Val composed what is now called the The Litany of Humility.  Praying this regularly helps us not only to obtain the grace to overcome pride, but helps motivate us by enabling us to see how deeply entrenched pride is in our hearts.  There is an inverse proportionality of sorts in the zeal in which we make this prayer and the amount of pride we have.  It is also great material for our personal examen.  “Jesus, grant me the grace to desire it…”