Letters for Lent

 Happy Valentine's Day, you filthy animals! Please accept this sign of my regard.

Of far more significance, liturgically speaking, is the upcoming season of Lent, for which we are all no doubt prepared. For the past several years, I've started pre-gaming my Lent, so to speak, by practicing some penances in advance -- fasting, adding in some prayer, turning down spot pleasures. I thought this was some odd inclination of my own, only to find out that there used to be an entire liturgical period, Septuagesima, devoted to this very practice of winding down for Lent. (I had seen the word Septuagesima before, being knocked around in the circles of people who complain a lot about things liturgical, so perhaps I'm at fault for not paying enough attention before now to what it referred.) 

This is the story of my spiritual life: an inclination, a conviction that seems unusual or against the grain, only to discover that scholars and sages through the centuries have pondered this very thing, only it never was covered in my religious education or in the circles I moved in. I nearly wept reading Hans Urs Von Balthazar's Dare We Hope That All Men Be Saved? This idea, which I had been tracking through my reading of the Bible, carefully noting down all verses that seemed to point to the idea that once all evil had been consumed as by fire, what was good, being of God himself, could not be lost and must indeed come back to Him and be joined to Him, was not a strange borderline heretical notion of my own, but one that had been openly debated through the ages. Our faith was far bigger, far more expansive and strange and wonderful than the dry, open-and-shut Baltimore Catechism Q&A would have one believe.

Indeed, it was about this time that I finally acted on an inclination that had been gaining force for years, and rid my house of the Baltimore Catechism, the Tan Children's Bible, that awful book of saint stories with the garish paintings of sickly virgins and purple Africans gratefully accepting baptism from a handsome priest, so popular as a First Communion gift (you know the one I mean), and indeed any children's book that accepted as a description of holiness that "he practiced the strictest chastity and had a devotion to our Blessed Mother". What does that even mean? What does that look like in practice? How can this pat pious depiction of dead-eyed saints have any truck with the immensity of joy and suffering to be found in Jesus, the growing understanding of Christian maturity that so much of what we know we do and can not know?

What have they to do with Love?

***

All this is to say that it's time for Lenten Letters. Should you like to receive a letter from me during Lent, please send your name and address to darwincatholic @ gmail.com, and I will do my best to write to everyone during Lent itself (though some years it's stretched out to Pentecost). I just write about whatever is on my mind at the moment, rather like the blog itself, so I suppose it's less of a correspondence and more of a "Have the fun of opening an envelope and getting what you get". I can't promise this year to use the nice paper and the fancy pen, but there will be a stamp and a flap to slit and an enclosure to withdraw that is not a bill or appeal or a summons. And many days, that itself is enough to make one smile.