Lent 3

Readings: Exodus 3:1-8a, 13-15; 1 Corinthians 10:1-6, 10-12; Luke 13:1-9

Video

The season of Lent is offered to us 
as a time of self-examination.
But why would we need to examine ourselves?
Normally when we speak of examining things
we are trying to find out something that is 
somehow obscure or hidden from us.
Doctors examine patients 
to see if there might not be ailments
that are not immediately apparent.
Teachers subject their students to examinations
to find out what knowledge they have 
hidden away in their heads.
Juries are invited to examine evidence 
to uncover the truth of what has occurred.
So why should we need to examine ourselves?
Can I be obscure to myself,
hidden from myself?

The fact that the Church calls us 
to self-examination during the season of Lent
suggests that this may actually be the case.
It suggests that we may have a way of hiding from ourselves,
deceiving ourselves about the state of our own souls,
convincing ourselves to ignore certain truths about who we are.
Jesus himself suggests as much in today’s Gospel,
saying that if we find ourselves thinking
that those who suffer tragic misfortune
must have been great sinners,
and a lack of tragic misfortune in our lives
must be a sign of our virtue,
we are fooling ourselves.
Jesus breaks through such self-deception,
saying, “I tell you, if you do not repent,
you will all perish as they did!”
Paul makes a similar point 
in his letter to the Corinthians.
After he recounts the unfaithfulness 
of the Israelites in the desert after the Exodus,
he warns his readers not to grow too smug 
about their standing before God;
the unfaithfulness of their ancestors in faith
should rather stand as a warning to them:
“whoever thinks he is standing secure
should take care not to fall.”

We human beings, it seems, 
have a propensity for self-deception.
Saint Catherine of Siena said that this is why 
we must make self-knowledge 
the foundation of our spiritual lives;
we must dwell, as she put it, 
in the house of self-knowledge.
But how do enter into 
this house of self-knowledge?
How do we examine ourselves 
so as to overcome 
our propensity to self-deceive?
Is self-examination simply a matter 
of cataloging our sins and failings,
of minutely poring over all 
that we have done wrong?
I don’t think so,
for we are not only more miserable
than we will admit to ourselves,
we are also far greater 
than we are willing to recognize.

Saint Catherine says that we 
cannot come truly to know ourselves
without knowing God.
And what we must know 
about ourselves and about God
is that God is, as he declares to Moses,
“I am who am”—the One who is—
and we, in contrast, are the ones who are not.
What Catherine means by this 
is that it is God’s very nature to exist,
and that everything else in the universe
has been created by God from nothing.
So while God is the One who is,
we are beings who have been drawn by God
out of nothingness into existence, 
in an act of unimaginable love.
When Catherine says 
that we must know that we are not,
she is saying that we must know that we exist
only because God has loved us into existence,
and we must also know that 
when we turn away from God
we begin to disappear back into nothingness.
To dwell in the house of self-knowledge
we must both acknowledge ourselves 
as artifacts of divine love,
and understand how catastrophic it is for us 
to turn away from that love
to a fruitless love of ourselves. 

During Lent we should ponder 
this double truth about ourselves,
the grandeur and misery of our condition.
We should hear Jesus’ words, 
“if you do not repent,
you will all perish as they did!”
not as a threat of divine punishment,
but as an invitation to let grace turn us back
to the God who has loved us 
out of nothingness into existence.
We should hear St. Paul’s words,
“whoever thinks he is standing secure
should take care not to fall,”
not as an exhortation to anxiety and fear
but as an invitation to us, who are not,
to plant our feet more firmly
on the solid rock of the One who is.
Our recognition of our own poverty
should make us only marvel more
at the richness of God’s grace
that has been bestowed upon us.

Our Lenten self-examination,
if it can pierce our self-deception,
should lead us to sincere sorrow 
for our sins and failings,
but also to a deep gratitude to God
for our creation and redemption
and our hope of eternal glory.
We begin Lent as the fruitless fig tree,
having done little with the time bestowed on us,
but given by grace one more season to turn 
from the sterile self-love that pulls us into nothingness
back to the embrace of the God who loves us.
And within that embrace we can become
like the thorn bush from which God spoke to Moses,
ablaze but not consumed by the fire of the One who is,
beacons that draw others into the embrace of God.

In this Lenten season,
may we come to know ourselves
as we come to know the One who is,
and may God have mercy on us all.

Lent 1

Readings: Deuteronomy 26:4-10; Romans 10:8-13; Luke 4:1-13

Video

There is nothing like starting Lent 
with a little metaphysics.
For those of you whose philosophy may be a tad rusty,
“metaphysics” is the study of existence itself:
asking what it means for something to exist
and what different sorts of existence there might be.
I think it is good to begin Lent with a little metaphysics
not simply as an act of penance,
though it might be that for some,
but because we begin Lent with the story
of Jesus in the wilderness, 
tempted by the evil one,
and we are ourselves are invited,
as we prayed on Ash Wednesday,
to “take up battle against spiritual evils.”
So it is good to ask what sort of existence evil has.

St. Augustine famously spoke of evil as privatio boni,
an absence or lack of a goodness that should be present.
He wrote, “In the bodies of animals, disease and wounds 
mean nothing but the absence of health….
Just in the same way, what are called vices in the soul
are nothing but privations of natural good” (Enchiridion ch. 11).
Evil is like a wound in existence,
a kind of nothingness that afflicts things;
it is a thing’s existing in a diminished way.
To some, the claim that evil exists 
only as an absence, a lack of a goodness,
might make it sound as if evil were somehow unreal,
which flies in the face of our experience of evil.
But, as the theologian Herbert McCabe noted,
the fact that the hole in your sock exists
only as a lack of sock where there should be sock
in no way suggests that the hole in your sock is unreal.
And likewise, the characterization of evil
as a lack of goodness where there should be goodness
in no way suggests that evil is unreal.

But even if we find this metaphysical account of evil convincing, 
there remains the question of how any of this helps us
to “take up battle against spiritual evils” in this season of Lent.
Are their practical implications to all this metaphysics?
I would argue that there are at least two.

First, we can be tempted 
to think that some people or things are purely evil, 
possessed of no goodness at all.
But, in fact, you can’t have all hole and no sock.
If the hole in my sock were to expand
to the point where there were no sock
there would be, funny enough, 
no longer any hole either.
Likewise with evil;
if it exists as a flaw within goodness,
then it needs some goodness within which to exist.
There is, in this sense, no such thing as “pure evil,” 
but only “wounded goodness.”
The things by which we are tempted
tempt us because they are good;
temptation is not the desiring of evil,
but desiring some good in the wrong way:
desiring too much food,
desiring the wrong sexual partner,
desiring success at the cost of others.
Food and sex and success are all good things,
but we can desire them in the wrong way.
And desire itself is a good thing:
we desire because we are alive
and that is certainly a good thing.
After forty days of fasting, Jesus is hungry,
and his hunger is good,
a sign that his body is functioning properly.
But desire can become twisted, misdirected;
it can become the occasion for temptation.
If there were such a thing as pure evil,
we could resist it quite easily;
but temptation grows from the fact
that evil is always lodged in good
in ways that are difficult to untangle.

Second, we can be tempted to think
that we can overcome evil simply by eliminating
the people and things we judge to be evil.
But if you have a hole in your sock,
you can’t get rid of it 
by cutting it out with a pair of scissors;
you end up only making the hole larger.
The hole must be repaired, reknitted, restored.
Likewise, you can’t eliminate evil from the world
simply by eliminating all the evil people.
Since evil only exists
as entangled with good,
our attempts to eliminate evil often result
in our inflicting further damage on the good.
This is one reason why the Church 
has come to reject the use of the death penalty,
seeing that it does not remedy evil
but only implicates us in it.
Just as you can only eliminate a hole in your sock
by knitting the sock back together,
so too you can only eliminate evil
by restoring the good it is afflicting.
As St. Augustine says, the only way 
to truly destroy your enemies
is to make them into your friends.
It is love that brings about this repair,
and we call this repair “conversion.”

Of course, in a world at war
all this may be a hard pill to swallow.
Can we really see someone like Vladimir Putin
not as pure evil but as wounded good?
Can we really believe that the evil 
being perpetrated in Ukraine
can be healed by love?
Wouldn’t it be easier, 
as some have suggested,
simply to take Mr. Putin out?
It is hard not to think so.
But the narrow way of the Gospel
that Jesus calls us to walk
is an invitation to mercy and forgiveness;
it calls us to see evil as damage
and to pray for the conversion of our enemies
even as we pray for healing for their victims.
Above all, the Gospel calls us to see 
the wounded good in ourselves,
to see ourselves as those in need of repair,
those in need of conversion.
And in this Lenten season Christ invites us 
to seek through God’s power
that which seems impossible for us
but which faith tells us is possible for God.

Let us pray that, in the weeks ahead,
God would turn us from the nothingness of evil,
back to himself, the source of all goodness,
to let grace repair the evil in our own hearts
so that we, in turn, can bring his healing to our world.
And may God have mercy on us all.