Lenten Intention: Letting God's Goodness Land in My Life

Friday, Mar. 03, 2017

This year for Lent I’m going to try something radically different: I intend to focus on what is positive, what is beautiful, what is right in this world.

At first blush this may not sound very Lent-ish. After all, aren’t the next six weeks supposed to be a time of deprivation? 

Well, no, actually not. Despite my long-held belief that Lent is meant to be about mortification, the truth of the matter is that the three pillars of the season are fasting, prayer and almsgiving, which are meant to lead us to die to sin and live in Christ. The fasting can be from food – and must be, on Ash Wednesday and all Fridays – but it can also mean refraining from certain activities that impede us from being true followers of Christ.

In my life, negativity prevents me from returning to God with all my heart. I’m very good at finding fault; I don’t do so well at seeing what is right in the world, and by not being open to that, aren’t I rejecting God, the giver of all good gifts?

An example was last Friday. After a full day at work, I headed to a funeral service (my third that week). Arriving there, I got a phone call telling me that something at work needed additional attention. So, after the rosary, I had dinner with friends, and drove back to the office. On the way I complained to God about all the negative things happening my life, and that he wasn’t helping me at all. He pointed out that I’d just had a good time with friends – we had talked and laughed and enjoyed ourselves. Which was true, but I left that warm glow behind as soon as I stepped out of the restaurant. 

“Lent is a time to discover whether anything other than God has power over us,” Father Robert McTeigue, SJ wrote in the Aleteia blog. For me, negativity overwhelms everything else, including God. That’s why I’m going to use the next six weeks to fast from it.

In his Lenten message this year, Pope Francis says that “At the basis of everything is the Word of God, which during this season we are invited to hear and ponder more deeply.”

So for Lent I plan to focus on being open to how “the heavens declare the glory of God,” not just in nature but in the world of man. 

I did a pre-Lent test drive of this resolution on Sunday by going out for a photo shoot with my new camera on the Jordan River Parkway. 

God was in fact waiting there for me, but it took awhile to find him because I had to work through all the things I found wrong about the day. Even now I’m resisting the temptation to run down the litany, none of which overshadows the mini-revelation God graced me with.

Let me set the scene. I was bundled in three layers, a hood and gloves against the cold wind. The first person I saw was a jogger in shorts, bare-headed, his only concession to the temperature a pair of gloves. Next came another jogger, similarly clad, though she wore tights, and then a dog-walker, wearing a light coat. Finally, a quiet voice in my head asked why I was comparing myself to them, particularly on something as trivial as clothing. Wasn’t it more important that we were all out on the path, enjoying the day in our own individual ways?

“Well, yeah,” I told God, “but I notice that I’m going in the opposite direction from them.”

To which he replied, “Where they are going, you have already been.”

He always gets the last word. 

I didn’t take very many photos that morning. Again, I could whine about why, but I’d rather share the shot that accompanies this column. Although it didn’t inspire me to ponder more deeply the Word of God, it did cause me to admire anew God’s creation. Which, I think, may be its entire purpose, because as Emerson said, beauty is its own excuse for being.