The Face of Grace Project

The third week of Lent begins and the ‘giving up’ may be tougher than planned! Giving up social media, taking on cold showers, perhaps learning to play board games again…hopefully Lent will bring a change in lifestyle that is life-changing. Our lifestyle conditions both our bodies and our psyche to conform to the media, entertainment, technology, food, and whatever else we take in. We instead want our humanity to conform to Christ.

Satan knows this, of course. He will work extra hard to stop you. A saint once asked Jesus why he permitted the enemy to attack her. Jesus responded that it gave opportunity for Him to rescue her.

I recall the decade of the 80’s working long hours, then coming home to sit on the couch watching TV all night. And the gluttony of snacking on just ‘a few’ chips but munching until the dip was gone, too tired to stop. I can also recall what it feels like to rely solely upon my own self-discipline: very limiting.

That was the decade I quit going to mass. I didn’t intend to quit. I just procrastinated each weekend for 11 years or so. But even under the weight of that sinfulness, there was still a little piece of something inside me that said I needed more discipline simply because it was the right thing to do. I hadn’t stopped talking with God; I simply quit visiting Him.

Unforgiveness in our heart is akin to a big sign that says, “demons welcome”. Life trauma can make it very difficult to forgive. The key to forgiveness is this: We must first desire to truly forgive the other person (and not just because others expect us to!). Since all desire comes from God, we must ask for this first until we have let Him fill us with sincerity. He has given us in our own nature the ability to do so intellectually. Typically, then, with His actual Grace we reach some tranquility, some level of forgiving the other person.

That is, until we actually must spend time with them again, and then something triggers the pain. What is forgiveness if it’s so quick to fade away?

When my niece was little, she would spit her chewed up candy into her hand and offer it to me with be biggest smile only outdone by the gleam of joy and excitement in her eyes. She was so sure I would understand how wonderful these are, and she couldn’t keep her joy to herself. It was easy to control my gag reflex because the love driving her desire to share was so all-encompassing! With reflection I realized my heart is mangled like that chewed up candy, and too much of my life has been spent hiding it from God. I finally came to learn that if I offer it to Him with that same purity of intent and desire to love as an innocent child, He responds with great affection.

God doesn’t have a gag reflex; he understands. There is nothing to hide.

Lent is more than a period of atonement for sin. Sincere atonement requires change. People just don’t like change, and the call to holiness is precisely that: change.

Once the desire to change is embraced, it can be difficult to keep our eye on the prize. With the cycle of shame keeping a person convinced of their shortcomings and unworthiness, it is difficult to see themselves for anything other than their faults. We make our brokenness our identity. God desires us to detach from the need to be perfect so that our efforts to reject temptation and overcome weaknesses are ordered towards loving and desiring Him.

As St. Francis of Assisi teaches us, our nothingness is the free space where God creates. This is the simplicity of Lent, making room for God.

For 16 years I was blessed with Blossom, our little Yorkshire Terrier who made me laugh every day. To keep us from leaving home without her, she would hide with her head and shoulders under my bed and her rump still out in the open. It was so funny to see this little five-pound Yorkie butt sticking up in the air. Meanwhile, she couldn’t see us so she assumed we couldn’t see her.

This is how we are with God too. Adam and Eve hid in the woods—did they really think God couldn’t see them? I have my default hiding spots, too, that I fall into when avoiding a ‘hard conversation’ with God…do I really think He can’t see me?

Perhaps the greatest change we can make this Lent is a new perspective. 😊

Twenty-five years ago, a Catholic parish in Arizona had a conundrum serving its mostly immigrant farm-working community. As the immigrants travel the circuit, their children are not in place long enough to be properly educated, including religious education. Two nuns asked a local farmer for permission to use his barn to give religion class to the children while their parents worked, to which he agreed. It eventually morphed to nuns coming back in the evenings to catechize the adults as well. This is the way of proper Catholic action, people helping one another. We have lost sight of this as our vision is distracted by a polarized mentality fueled by the media. It is a heritage and a freedom we risk losing altogether.

It is important that we take part in public discourse promoting the intrinsic value of life at all stages and ages from conception to natural death. However, that discourse needs to be the outcome of a lived faith. A lived faith is one that changes us, the believers.