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James K. Baxter Complete Prose Volume 1

Lent in Retrospect

Lent in Retrospect

It is heard by many people, and with some justice, that a Catholic man should be joyful. I see a difficulty in this point of view.

The Church, which introduces us to the truth about God, as far as such truth can be expressed in human concepts, introduces us also to the truth about ourselves. On both subjects modern people may be surprisingly ignorant.

In the Litany of Loreto Our Lady is addressed specifically as the ‘Cause of Our Joy’. This is reasonable, since the Incarnation hinged on her consent, as in a darker manner the Fall of Man hinged on the consent of Eve; and whatever permanent joy we have flows and will flow from the Incarnation. Yet the face which we look on in the Pietà is the most sorrowful face the world has ever seen. Her soul has become grief itself; she shares in the sorrow of God. Her grief is occasioned by sin, and the effects of sin, in the hideous butchery of her Son.

No doubt her grief, in that eternal moment of the Pietà will turn into an everlasting joy; but while it lasts it is all grief, yours and mine, the grief of the concentration camp and the home torn apart by sin; her soul is drowned by it, her soul lacks any joy, and only the consent of her will remains unshaken.

How can Catholics be joyful, who see in their own soul, and the souls of others, the seemingly endless havoc of sin? Truly, they believe, they hope, they endeavour to love. But the sense of sin remains – not the sense of responsibility for specific sins (though this may be very real also) but the sense of the alienation of human life from its source and centre, from God the Truth who underlies all secondary truths. This, as I take it, is the meaning of a sense ofpage 419 sin. By bringing us closer to God, the Church increases our sense of sin.

The friends of afflicted people may say to them: ‘Have courage. The very affliction which you endure will be the agent of your eventual joy.’ Yet could they have said this to Our Lady when she held her dead Son in her arms? They could only have been silent in the presence of supernatural grief.

One part of the lesson we are taught by Lent is perhaps to be silent in the presence of true affliction. Lent is the winter of the soul. Through the penances of Lent we learn to identify ourselves silently with the affliction of Our Lord. The best fruit of Lent may be an unquenchable hunger for that Reality from which we have learnt that we are alienated, as God was mysteriously alienated from God in Our Lord’s cry of abandonment on the Cross.

It seems that God rarely removes from us our natural defects of will, memory and understanding. We may try most resolutely to mend our lives and see no visible sign of improvement. But our grief itself may reduce the soul to a knowledge of its true stature (small, weak, fickle, subject to nature, real only insofar as God sustains and inhabits it) and so make possible a fuller reception of grace.

Let the delusions go from us and God will take care of the rest. Yet it seems that the new delusions of knowledge, virtue, self-importance, which fill the house of the soul can only be banished by affliction. Affliction is the broom of God. When the house is swept clean, the householder can laugh again, but the laugh will have a different ring to it.

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