On our final Sunday before we begin the Lenten pilgrimage, we have an Epistle about divine Charity and a Gospel which contrasts the new sight of a formerly blind man and the lack of spiritual insight of the disciples who
“understood none of these things, and this saying was hid from them.”
Lent is given us by the Church as a sort of 40 day desert experience, a time to focus our lives on God and seek to look deep within ourselves that we may begin to discern the ways of our own hearts.
We begin something like the disciples, for most of us, each year, quickly forget the lessons of Lent & Easter and slip back into our normal, worldly routines, even forgetting that we have forgotten.
We must come like the blind man both crying out to God for mercy and grace, and determining that we will not be deterred from our quest.
It is for us a struggle for true repentance, for metanoia, which is nothing less than the transformation and illumination of the eye of our soul, the nous. This renewal is accomplished by the grace of God, but it is not without struggle, like the blind man trying to get our Lord’s attention amongst the crowd.
We are daily in the midst of a crowd of both our external world, and of the interior noise and attitudes habits and passions that have been established in us.
Contrary to most ideas, repentance is not a moral exercise; it is not even something we are supposed to do: it is a change of heart that comes about as a result of our becoming aware of the dangers in continuing to want what we have always wanted; it occurs in that moment when we realize that we actually want God more than we want our ordinary satisfactions. It transforms the way we perceive the world as well as ourselves, and it is by the grace of God that we are changed.
When this change becomes increasingly permanent in us, when metanoia/repentance becomes our way of life, our renewal begins. If the discernment which comes about as a result of this is sustained, it will automatically lead to a changed attitude to ourselves.
When this change in our attitude to ourselves reaches “critical mass” there begins what is normally a long and difficult struggle with the attitudes and habits of mind that have ruled us until now.
This is why the sacrament of Confession is stressed especially during Lent, because it is quintessentially the sacrament of self-knowledge, intensifying our approach to repentance.
Lent is an annual call to return to our first love. Yet, for most of us this love is more associated with the bodily passions than with the search and longing for God. It too must be transformed, so that we do not take the reflection for the source.
If we meditate on our Epistle today, St. Paul’s great chapter on genuine Love, we begin to understand that a true abyss separates this Love from a “loving” passion. Passion’s motivation is to possess, and this produces effects precisely opposite to those described by St. Paul. The true spirit of Love is to give with no return.
One other aspect we need to be aware of during Lent is that of overcoming the illusion of difficulty that makes us give up. We tend to think that any kind of ascesis is impossible. When first the struggle becomes wholly real, it becomes much more difficult, and when one first meets this degree of difficulty, the whole thing appears impossible.
To walk on the Royal Road demands a different kind of exertion, which begins in a different place in us. We must pass through the strait and narrow gate, rather than surrender the struggle and seek easier ways, even if those easier ways mean reaching lesser goals. The difficulty itself is an illusion with which we must struggle.
For some, fasting requires super efforts, but they are efforts against illusion…efforts to transcend the imaginary limits on our abilities that we have habitually accepted. For others, prayer requires super efforts, but those too are in large part against illusion. Super efforts are a struggle with expectations, the effort to do what we are really capable of, instead of that to which we have habitually believed ourselves to be limited. What we seek by our effort is the awakening of Christ in us, whose authority is very different from the fickle authority of the ordinary content of our psyche.
Lent is a stimulus to us to deeply examine the soul which is meant to rule our body. It is the time to seek the eye of this soul, the nous, which is created to be attracted to the Spirit of God, and indeed filled with His energies, that we may both see, and understand the things of the Kingdom more clearly. That we may see reality as it truly is.