Lent is among the least understood, most misappropriated seasons of the liturgical year, which is really saying something when you consider what’s become of Advent. Originally intended as a preparatory period for catechumens on the final leg of their journey into the Christian church that would culminate with their reception of the sacraments of initiation at the Easter Vigil, it’s devolved into a gloomy season focused on trivial self-denials, while ignoring the weightier matters of the way of the cross. Giving up sweets or alcohol or — as I’m doing this year — social media is fine and good, but we are called to so much more than self-denial. Austerity for austerity’s sake is hardly asceticism. In fact, in some cases, it might feed into some of the very inclinations of which God would purge us in this season, had we but ears to hear.
As with all of the Christian life, Lent calls us not to superficialities nor to self-inflicted misery, not even to discipline as an end in itself, but to the new life freely given to us by God in Jesus Christ and his Holy Spirit. Lent, like the whole of the Christian life, calls us to conversion. Our evangelical coreligionists are right to emphasize conversion. They go amiss only insofar as they construe it as a punctiliar event and not a lifelong journey. Some of us have moments of conversion that we can remember, many of us do not, but none of us have been converted in so final a sense that we’re done with it. Our conversions will never be complete until we reach the resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come. Lent can serve as a yearly reminder that the journey is not yet complete, an invitation to reembark upon it, just as these catechumens are. (And if we have no catechumens in our contexts we ought to ask ourselves why that is. To some extent this is beyond our control, but I would venture that in a plurality of such situations, we’ll find a dearth of evangelism. “How are they to call on one in whom they have not believed? And how are they to believe in one of whom they have never heard? And how are they to hear without someone to proclaim him?” (Rom. 10:14)
But I’m not here to scold. In fact, such scolding ranks high among the distortions of Lent that I hope we’ll avoid. Instead, I hope to show us a better way. And to that end, I share a few passages from one of my theological mentors.
I have endeavored to think alongside the French Jesuit Henri de Lubac for the last 11 or so years. I was initially enamored of him due to his reception within Radical Orthodoxy, but my study of de Lubac has led me to a rather different understanding (one of the best refutations of Radical Orthodoxy’s reading of de Lubac is Jordan Hillebert’s Henri de Lubac and the Drama of Human Existence). Beginning with a doctoral seminar in 2013, I have been captivated by the recurring theme of humanity’s incorporation into the life of the Trinity through the cross and resurrection of the incarnate Christ, which shows up throughout de Lubac’s œuvre. He was hardly a systematic thinker, and he wrote about a dizzying array of topics, so this theme is, perhaps, easy to miss. Certainly I found very little mention of it in the English-language scholarship on him. At the same time, I found it unmistakably present, and not just in passing, but as a central theme of his thought.
Pulling upon that thread led to the eventual publication of my own contribution to Lubacian studies, Salvation in Henri de Lubac: Divine Grace, Human Nature, and the Mystery of the Cross. (Along the way, I discovered that while Anglophone scholarship more or less overlooked the theme of trinitarian incorporation, Francophone literature was replete with it.) I’d initially wanted to call the book Mysterium Crucis (mystery of the cross), because it is that mystery and our coming to share in it that looms so large in my account of de Lubac’s theological vision. The marketing department at the University of Notre Dame Press was of the opinion that opaque Latin titles weren’t particularly good for attracting readers, though. And they’re probably right about that, but I was left a bit wistful.
In any case, that original title comes from the concluding section of de Lubac’s first book and manifesto, Catholicism: Christ and the Common Destiny of Man (which, by the way, is the best entry point into his thought, in case anyone is interested in learning more). There he writes:
Wherever a Christian’s meditations may have led him, he is always brought back, as by a natural bias, to the contemplation of the Cross. The whole mystery of Christ is a mystery of resurrection, but it is also a mystery of death. One is bound up with the other and the same word, Pasch, conveys both ideas. Pasch means passing over. It is a transmutation of the whole being, a complete separation from oneself which no one can hope to evade. … If no one may escape from humanity, humanity whole and entire must die to itself in each of its members so as to live transfigured in God. … Through Christ dying on the Cross, the humanity which he bore whole and entire in his own Person renounces itself and dies. But the mystery is deeper still. He who bore all men in himself was deserted by all. The universal Man died alone. … This is the mystery of solitude and the mystery of severance, the only efficacious sign of gathering together and of unity: the sacred blade piercing indeed so deep as to separate soul from spirit, but only that universal life might enter. (pp. 367–68)
This passage reprises and forms a bookend with a celebrated passage from Catholicism’s first chapter:
He incorporated himself in our humanity, and incorporated … it in himself … In making a human nature, it is human nature that he united to himself, that he enclosed in himself, and it is the later, whole and entire, that in some sort he uses as a body…Whole and entire he will bear it then to Calvary, whole and entire he will raise it from the dead, whole and entire he will save it. (pp. 37–39)
That repeated phrase whole and entire is what I want to stress for us in the context of thinking about our Lenten conversion. And I wish to do so along three vectors. First, that to which God calls us in Christ is all-encompassing, far surpassing any of our efforts at ascesis, from the most trivial to the genuinely heroic. God’s invitation to us to join in God’s very life — to share in the Son’s eternal place within the Trinity — is simply speaking beyond our capacity for attainment. We are hindered from this not only by our sins, but also by our finitude. Salvation is far more than the forgiveness of our transgressions. It is an absolutely supernatural reality, such that even if we had no sins to be forgiven, still we would need the grace of God to attain it. Thus, our conversion must be total: whole and entire. Nothing that distracts or detracts from God can remain. And our Lenten self-discipline can be a tiny little exercise in such pruning.
This brings us directly to the second vector I would traverse. We are called not to renunciation per se, but into the fullness of life. By God’s grace, given in Christ and the Holy Spirit, we are invited to pass whole and entire into the reality of true, universal, limitless life. As the Collect for Fridays reminds us, the “way of the cross … is none other than the way of life and peace” (BCP, p. 99). Our renunciations and self-denials are not the denial of ourselves, but the clearing of the way to a far greater self-affirmation than what we’re capable of by nature, an affirmation given in its fullness in Jesus Christ, who has taken up our humanity whole and entire so that he can bear it whole and entire into the fullness of his own divine life.
Finally, we come to the third vector: while we are all called upon to die to ourselves, while humanity itself, whole and entire, must die to itself, in the end, “The Universal Man died alone” (Catholicism, p. 368). This dying unto eternal life is reproduced in each of us, sacramentally (Rom. 6), morally (Gal. 2), and, ultimately, physically (1 Cor. 15), but it has been accomplished definitively — whole and entire — in Jesus’ own death and resurrection. He alone is our salvation, and we are drawn along in his wake.
And so, as Lent drags on, and our motivation perhaps flags, or perhaps we lose sight of the wherefore and why of this season and its journey, let us once more fix our eyes upon Jesus, the pioneer and perfector of our faith, and let us run the race that remains before us, not only for the remainder of these 40 days, but for the remainder of our lives, knowing that ultimately the race is already won — whole and entire.
