A Holy Lent (Trinitarian Letter)

A Holy Lent

Fr. Tony’s Letter to the Trinitarians

March 2019

Observing Lent was the first step I took in leaving the Mormonism of my youth and embracing Anglican Catholicism.  I usually give up all meat for the Lenten fast, and find the discipline not only improves my spiritual life, but also makes my eating and cooking more intentional, and with this intentionality, better.   I like meat, and was profoundly grateful to learn that Lent is the 40 days before Easter exclusive of Sundays.  Sundays, as little weekly Easter Feasts themselves, are not subject to the normal fasting rules of Lent.  And so if I began to feel a bit protein starved mid-Lent, I came to appreciate this “day of rest” from my Lenten discipline.  Steak on Sundays—yum, yum. 

Abstaining from meat, alcohol, tobacco, or caffeine, however, is not what Lent is about.  It is about the change imposed by any such discipline.  Imposing change on ourselves is intended to give us new eyes to see things, new hearts to feel and experience our lives.  

  

Irving Babbitt (1865-1933), founder of the neo-humanist movement in education and criticism, and one of T.S. Eliot’s mentors and teachers, wrote, 

“That man is most human who can check his faculty, even if it be his master-faculty, and his passion, even his ruling passion, in its mid-career, and temper it by its opposite” (Literature and the American College, p. 57).    

Such self-correction for Babbitt rested in a careful balance of emotion and reason, of things old and things new.   Babbitt applied this to our social and political arrangements in a democracy:  

 “If we are told that it is not democratic to strive to produce the superior man, we should reply with Aristotle that the remedy for democracy is not more democracy, but that, on the contrary, if we wish a democracy that is to endure we should temper it by its opposite—with the idea of quality and selection.  True democracy consists not in lowering the standard but in giving everybody, as far as possible, a chance of measuring up to that standard” (“English and the Discipline of Ideas,” The English Journal 9:2 [Feb., 1920], p. 65.) 

 

Tempering our default selves, our regular perceptions and values, and our habitual way of acting and being—tempering these by their opposites—is what Lent is about.  Madeleine L’Engle expressed it thus: 

For Lent, 1966

It is my Lent to break my Lent,

  To eat when I would fast,

To know when slender strength is spent,

   Take shelter from the blast

When I would run with wind and rain,

   To sleep when I would watch.

It is my Lent to smile at pain

  But not ignore its touch. 

It is my Lent to listen well

   When I would be alone,

To talk when I would rather dwell

  In silence, turn from none

Who call on me, to try to see

  That what is truly meant

Is not my choice.  If Christ’s I’d be

  It’s thus I’ll keep my Lent. 

I invite all of us to the observance of Holy Lent.  I encourage us to stretch ourselves—our minds, hearts, bodies, and sensibilities—by intentional going off our normal paths.  Each one of us is unique, and so that means that we each need to find the controlling faculties and passions we have that we need to temper with their opposite. 

Grace and Peace,

Fr. Tony+