Father Kleppner - February 6th 2005
As we begin the season of Lent, this week, with Ash Wednesday, I would like to share with you the beautiful insights of Msgr. Richard Antall as to how we might deepen our life of prayer and our spiritual life in general.
If your spiritual life has struck sour notes lately, the Lenten season is the perfect time to get in harmony with Christ. The great Spanish spiritual writer Francisco Fernandez-Carvajal tells the story. A poor fiddler makes his living in the streets, playing simple melodies on an old violin. He plays in the plazas where people gather, gives his little performance and then passes the hat. One day he is playing the simple melodies he knows in the way he knows how, and a man walking by stops dead in his tracks. Something in his manner commands respect. He asks the fiddler if he can see his violin. Taking the old instrument in his hands, he begins to tune it. The crowd looks on as the man plucks the strings and adjusts them. The stranger begins to play. The music is at once so beautiful and so moving that everyone in the crowd is astonished. Perhaps no one is more surprised than the poor, old fiddler. He walks from one side of the group to the other, standing around the man making the music, saying, “That is my violin. He is playing my violin.” The musician is a master composer and a virtuoso violinist. He is able to make the instrument reveal all that it was capable of producing. Maybe you have thought that you have not lived up to your potential. The story is a way of looking at that. The instrument needed to be tuned; it required another touch. The instrument was capable of much sweeter music than it had been playing. And so it is with our prayer life. Christ, the virtuoso of life, has to cradle us in His arms and reveal our true potential. There is a Spanish expression that translates to “He who feeds on crumbs is always hungry.” That could be our problem, don’t you think? We dedicate so little time and effort to prayer, it is no wonder that it does not fill us with God’s Spirit. The noise that comes out of our violin, the melodies that we play, are not the music that should be flowing out of us. When we pass the hat, we are aware of how poorly we have done.
Spiritual housecleaning The first is to seek some purity of intention in our lives. That means, says a Cistercian spiritual writer I admire, being able to look in the eyes of Jesus. Sin makes us reluctant to pray. We do not want to face the Lord if we are still planning to do something not in accord with His love. Prayer needs a certain freedom of heart. We have to set about liberating our heart from all that holds us back from God and His grace. This applies to big-ticket items like mortal sin and also to other attitudes that often reflect the consequences of sin. An example of the latter is resentment. A woman I know did not receive Communion for years because she had not been able to get over the murder of her son. Obviously, it was a tragedy that she had waited so long. However, what I admired about her confession was that she had decided finally to let go of the hatred and was ready to reincorporate into the Body of Christ. I wondered as I talked to her if her faith was not superior to others who were receiving Communion. At least she knew that she had to let go of her bitter desires for revenge. I am more afraid for people who nurse terrible resentments but continue a life of faith on an external level. They go to Mass and Communion, but their hearts are imprisoned because of tremendous and deep-seated negative feelings for others. The contradiction of being a member of the Body of Christ is being filled with poison does not present itself to them in real terms. So often, healing is not just welcome for the sufferer of resentment, it is necessary in order to live the life of grace. Even if we do not have very serious problems to deal with, sometimes we have an abundance of other distractions. These could be problems with temperance, overeating or drinking too much on occasion. We fail to control our temper. Our charity fails to pass the test of many daily irritations. We talk unkindly about people, or we judge their motives. Preoccupations about money, unhealthy attachments to what is not our spiritual good, negligence in prayer and at Mass, a lack of care in our daily examination of conscience—all these separately and together make it very difficult to pray. Lent—the word comes from Anglo-Saxon for “spring”—should be a time for spiritual housecleaning.
Graceful remedies Besides the confession, there is the daily examination of conscience at the end of the day. We ought to think of the words of St. John of the Cross, “at the end of the day, we will be judged by our love.” How have we lived the love of God each day — in thought, word, in what we have done and what we have failed to do? A habit of thinking about the day as a spiritual reality—“What was the Lord offering me here; how did I fail Him there?”—is necessary for growth but also very helpful for prayer. We recall the Lord’s forgiveness, and we promise to do better tomorrow. There we have some quality themes for our prayer. Increased intercession can be a help to prayer during Lent. A priest who taught me assigned intention for his prayer of the breviary: Monday for his converts, Tuesday for his parents, etc. It would be interesting to keep a record of those we want to remember in our prayers especially day by day this Lent. We could write their names or their initials in a calendar, and it would remind us of the Communion of the Saints; in prayer and helping others we will be sanctifying ourselves. Obviously, daily Scripture reading and participation in Mass are great resources. So are visits to the Blessed Sacrament, much easier now that so many parishes have Perpetual Adoration chapels. Any such activity increases in seriousness, however, if joined by intentionality. We pray that this reading help us to be stronger against temptation or we offer this visit for the sick or the souls in purgatory. Many people have forgotten about offering their Communions, but this, too, is a way of being generous and receiving blessings at the same time. The Rosary is always a gift of grace; the Way of the Cross is medicine for the soul. The Lord will present us with innumerable graces these 40 days. Think of the fiddler’s violin. There is beautiful music within each one of us. |
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Catholics may feel a little rushed into the Lenten season this year with Ash Wednesday falling just a little over one month after Epiphany. The date of Easter is fixed to the Sunday after the first full moon after the vernal equinox. The vernal equinox, which occurs when the sun crosses directly over the Earth’s equator, marks the first day of spring. Easter is March 27 this year. In the early Church, controversy arose over when Easter should be observed. According to the 2005 Catholic Almanac: “Some early Christians in the Near East, called Quartodecimans, favored the observance of Easter on the 14th day of Nisan, the spring month of the Hebrew calendar, whenever it occurred. Against this practice, Pope St. Victor I, about 190, ordered a Sunday observance of the feast. The Council of Nicaea, in line with usages of the Church at Rome and Alexandria, decreed in 325 that Easter should be observed on the Sunday following the first full moon of spring.” The Catholic Encyclopedia states that the feast itself “was considered the time to welcome new catechumens into the Church by baptism at the great vigil…. They had a long catechumenate with special preparation 40 days before, and as all Christians began to see the need for preparation for the Easter feast, Lent developed.” In 2006, Ash Wednesday and Easter fall on March 1 and April 16 respectively. |
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