Tuesday, February 14, 2023

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.

3 comments:

  1. I found one of your Lenten letters recently, tucked into a notebook along with the beginning of a reply that I never finished and sent. It was so lovely to receive a letter from you.

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  2. Graham Greene's Brighton Rock priest, with his idea of "the appalling strangeness of the mercy of God" really struck me hard at the time I listened to the audiobook.

    I wonder if perhaps it's more challenging for those of us who identify more with "the elder son" in the Prodigal Father :-) parable to allow for a God whose love and mercy and justice are too big for us to see properly, in dimensions we can't wrap our tiny human heads around....Maybe those who have lived the younger son's journey in parts of their lives have a tiny lived experience that says, "God loves even people like me, so perhaps even people like [ ], and even against our kicking and screaming denials"

    It also seems to me that if we "dare hope" (as long as it's not out of a lazy desire not to have to go out there and try to share the gospel, which I know for me is way too much the case) how much more must God, who created all of us, want us all home. As my nest starts to empty, I feel this in a more visceral way (and feel bad about not calling home more often myself).

    I like the early Baltimore catechism Qs and other easy definition-like Q/A like "a Sacrament is an efficacious sign, making present the grace it signifies" or "Love is willing the good of the other" because they help furnish the mind so it can take on the weightier things, but I agree the bigger things can't really be pinned down. Tangentially related, someone I know who studies these things said, in discussing his reservations about Scholasticism, that St Thomas Aquinas took everything apart in order to study it and then put it back together again with understanding, while many in Scholasticism take everything apart...and then walk away.

    And as far as books to get rid of, I was glad to rid my house of the "lovely" child's book about how a first communicant died of the overwhelming rapture of finally receiving Jesus - I don't think it will inspire my 1st grader with the character's devotion to the Blessed Sacrament and the gift of heaven so much as terrify. The Eucharist: it could kill you. :-/ Not what I'm trying to teach.

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  3. I've definitely looked at some of the Tan highschool theology/ history books with suspicion.

    Do you have any suggestions for children's bibles or saints books that you love?

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