Liturgy: The Church's Spirituality
Bruce T. Morrill, S.J.

ENTERING INTO THE EASTER CYCLE

What are you giving up for Lent? The question is so ingrained in the popular piety of Roman Catholics that asking and answering it, in itself, constitutes a ritual tradition in the Church. Catholics so widely approach Ash Wednesday by swapping their Lenten resolutions that one finds even younger believers, many scarcely acquainted with Catholic practices, having learned this form of discipline from their elders. But to what end? Beginning the Season of Lent with this mini-dialogue, however true it is to the Church's greater tradition, only amounts to a half-truth. Like all half-truths, it runs the risk of missing the basic point which, in this case, happens to be the very heart of the Christian faith we celebrate. As is always the case with the Gospel, we come here upon a situation in which God's promise is great, but in the face of human danger.

The heart of the Gospel is the revelation that God has raised into a new form of life Jesus, God's faithful Son, who loved the Father he met in people's joys and sufferings even to the point of human rejection, torture and death. For this reason the earliest believers centered their weeks on Sunday, the Lord's Day, the weekly feast celebrating what God has done for all in raising the crucified Jesus as the sacrament of our salvation. Sunday is the Church's original feast. But like any human feast, the way to prepare is with a fast, a means of tuning our entire selves, body-mind-spirit, to the exultant song God is about to sing in us. The earliest Christians' fast days were Wednesday and Friday, preparing for the Lord's Day. An annual Easter feast only began in the second century, gradually expanding into a fifty-day celebration ending with Pentecost Sunday and, even more gradually, reaching back into a forty-day Lenten period of preparation by prayer, fasting and almsgiving. The two seasons together comprise the great Easter Cycle. And notice: Easter is longer than Lent by ten whole days!

The danger as we begin Lent lies in thinking that the purpose of this season is for us to make ourselves worthy of Easter or, worse yet, "to make it up to God" for the part we have each played in Christ's suffering in humanity. This approach risks a dead end on Good Friday, missing the good news, the true Gospel that awaits us there and beyond. On the contrary, we enter Lent in response to God's loving invitation to live and celebrate Easter as an entire way of life, a life spent turning away from sin and embracing the Christ who continuously extends his arms to us, ushering us into the banquet of the Kingdom.

Jesuit Father Bruce Morrill teaches in the Department of Theology at Boston College.