‘Hello ... This is God calling’

What do you remember about Lent? Depending on your age and your perspective, Lent can mean a host of different things: hot-cross buns, leaving school for Friday Stations, ashes, meatless Fridays and parish fish fries, fast and abstinence regulations that you might have needed a lawyer to interpret in the old days, paczki, pierogies and palms, giving up candy, giving up movies, giving up television (or giving up radio!) ... the list goes on and on.

We all know that Lent is much more than all these collective memories and traditions. We know it is a season of prayer, penance and almsgiving in preparation for Holy Week and Easter. It is the feel of the ashes placed on our foreheads on Ash Wednesday and the feel of genuflections at the Stations of the Cross. It is the profound movement of the liturgy through the season toward Holy Week, Calvary and the cross, and ultimately the empty tomb of Easter.

This Lent began early — very early! Ash Wednesday fell on Feb. 6, and is just two days short of the earliest that the season can begin. We are used to having Lent carry us from late winter to early spring. This year, it begins just a few days after the Super Bowl and ends one week shy of the baseball season.

I am told that in many ways Lent has as much a pull on Catholics that have fallen away from the practice of the faith as Christmas. I don’t know if that is true, but rumor has it that there are those among us who might have been a long time from regular practice of the faith, but who show up at the beginning of every Lent for ashes on Ash Wednesday. If that’s true, welcome! And please stay!

More than ashes and fasting

Thirty years ago, when I was a “wet behind the ears” parochial vicar at Sacred Heart Parish in Pittsburgh’s Shadyside neighborhood, I remember wanting to get people’s attention to take Lent seriously. When I got into the high pulpit in Sacred Heart Church on the Sunday before Lent, I planted a telephone near the Book of the Gospels. When I finished proclaiming the Gospel for that Sunday, I began my homily. After the first two sentences at the appropriate cue, the phone began ringing. (The sacristan, Jack Claney, had pressed a button on the tape recorder hooked up to the public address system.) When I answered the phone, the voice on the other “end” (heard by the entire congregation) said: “Hello ... This is God calling” — and then went on for a minute or so expressing his hopes for a good Lent from the congregation. (Actually, the taped voice of God was recorded days before in the church late in the evening with my friend, Frank Regan, as the voice of God. The echo was prefect. Frank’s deep voice made God’s voice dramatic.)

What began as an innovative idea on the part of a young inexperienced priest who was excited about Lent had its effect. People left church that Sunday, realizing that Lent is about more than ashes, fasting, Stations, etc. It is about God calling us to be different, to change. It is about us responding to God with more sincere prayer, more generous outreach to others, more purifying fasting.

It is the richness and depth of our faith that makes Lent come alive. All those things we associate with Lent — everything from pierogies to ashes — are symbols and practices that take on a whole new meaning when seen and lived through the light of faith. The days of penance during the Lenten season are intense and wondrous moments in the life of the church because Lent is our 40 days in the desert with Jesus.

Closer to Jesus

Lent is so appropriate for spiritual exercises, penitential liturgies, self-denial, charitable acts and many service efforts. Lent clearly links penance and the Eucharist. Through the Eucharist we are strengthened in our faith through Jesus’ presence in us. And through the sacrament of penance we encounter God’s merciful love.

If we are excited about our faith, Lent is not a time of dreariness; not a time for sad faces (“God save us from sad-faced saints!” — St. Teresa of Avila); not a time for gritting through Fridays without meat. It is a time — like every day of the year — to be excited about our faith.

Lent is more than a series of rote exercises. It is a way to increase our excitement for our faith, to deepen our love of our faith and to bring us closer to Jesus through our faith.

“Hello ... This is God calling.” Am I — are you — ready to answer him this Lent?