What Do Lent and Holy Week Have to Do With Me?

By Jim Tonkowich Published on March 28, 2018

There was a time, remarked twentieth century theologian Karl Rahner, when people were “full of life’s joy, satisfied and carefree, and they celebrated Mardi Gras in the streets and laughed the laughter that still came from the heart. Therefore, they could presumably experience a brief period of recollection, of contemplative seriousness, and of ascetic restraint from life’s luxuries as a beneficial change from everyday life and for the good of the soul.” Lent and Holy Week made sense.

Our world, by contrast, seems one great long Lent of high school shootings, broken relationships, addictions, hopelessness, loneliness, and bitterness. Politics poisons everything from religion to Monday Night Football. Young adults feel “stressed out” more than six hours daily with many abandoning the Christian faith in which they were raised.

“What about us?” Rahner went on, in his sermon “My Night Knows No Darkness.” What do Lent and Holy Week have to do with me?

While Rahner was clear that not everyone feels distance from God, he does claim that most people sense God’s cold absence more than his warm and comforting presence. If individuals can experience “the dark night of the soul” — what the Puritans called “spiritual desertion” — so can whole peoples and cultures. And we are such a people living in such a culture.

Affirming the True God

The cure — though “cure” is hardly the correct word since there is no three-step fix — begins by affirming the true God as over against the gods we think suit us better. “When you experience the heart’s emptiness like that,” asked Rahner, “what kind of God is it who is actually distant from you? It certainly is not the true and living God, for he is the incomprehensible, the nameless one who is truly the God of your boundless heart.”

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Instead, “The one distant from you is a god that does not exist: a god that can be comprehended, a god of small ideas and cheap, undemanding human thoughts, a god of Earthly security, a god that makes sure that the children do not cry and that human love does not end up in disappointment — in short, a rather dignified idol.”

This is the god sociologist Christian Smith had in mind when he coined the phrase “moralistic, therapeutic deism.” It is the de facto god of most of America’s young people regardless of the religion they claim. This god is little more than a very big, powerful, celestial valet faithfully catering to our rather petty human needs and wants. Worse yet, young people inherited this god from their parents.

A Still, Small Voice

The true God, out of His infinite love, will not let us get away with this small and cheap substitute deity.

Thus, Rahner insisted, we must come to realize that rather than deserting us, “he has been expecting you for a long time in the deepest dungeon of your debris-covered heart, that he has been silently listening and waiting for a long time to see whether you in the busy din that is called your life might give him a chance to speak, to speak a word that has sounded up until then only like deathly silence.”

We are, Rahner went on, experiencing God in the way Jesus experienced Him in the abandonment in the Garden of Gethsemane and on the Cross.

In spite of the feelings of distance or abandonment, stay a while at the foot of the Cross. Don’t run from the sight as many disciples did.

Which brings me back to Lent and Holy Week.

“Can’t I just be in peace?” we ask. “Can’t I contemplate the resurrection without all that fasting, self-examination, confession of sins, and brokenness? Give me Easter chocolate, not Lenten pottage.”

And many of us arrange our spiritual lives accordingly. Yet the sadness remains.

There’s Time Enough for Easter

In Death on a Friday Afternoon, his meditations on the seven last words of Jesus, Richard John Neuhaus wrote concerning Good Friday, “Wherever its name comes from, let your present moment stay with this day. Stay a while in the eclipse of the light, stay a while with the conquered One. There is time enough for Easter.”

“The only joy to be trusted,” Neuhaus went on, “is the joy on the far side of a broken heart; the only life to be trusted is the life on the far side of death. Stay a while, with Christ and him crucified.”

And not just through Holy Week, Good Friday, and the strange silence of Holy Saturday, but every day.

In spite of the feelings of distance or abandonment, stay a while at the foot of the Cross. Don’t run from the sight as many disciples did. Don’t turn to distractions. Wait with Mary and John to be with Him, to hear Him if He speaks, to watch Him as He dies.

“There is,” as Fr. Neuhaus pointed out, “time enough for Easter” — an eternity, in fact.

 

Note: Karl Rahner’s sermon “My Night Knows No Darkness” will be one of the texts this June 10-14 at The Wyoming School of Catholic Thought as we consider “The Paradox of Courage: Desire to Live, Readiness to Die.” Click here for more information.

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