The Three Pillars of Lent Explained

Rev. Marcel Divine Emeka Okwara, CSsR

Tuesday, February 25, 2020

What Lent Means 

Lent is a penitential period when people come to grips with their limitations, their sins, and their attachments in order to prepare for real communion with God. It is a period of preparation for Easter. Lent is a 40 day period which corresponds with Jesus’ own 40 days in the desert preparing for his own public ministry. The purpose of Lent is to get us ready and prepared for Easter. Pivotal moments like the birth of Jesus and the resurrection of Jesus are something we do every year, and it is imperative we do them adequately prepared spiritually. Moreover, as his followers, it is vital that from time to time we go into the desert. A lot of important things happen in the desert.

For a lot of Catholics, when we hear “Lent,” we think it is giving up chocolate or beer. I am not saying there is no good in giving up whatever we are attached to during the season of Lent, however, Lent is and should be more than just giving up sweets and drinks for 40 days. Traditionally, Lent involves three practices— prayer, fasting (this is where the giving up of sweets and drinks come in), and alms-giving. Lent is about practices, about the things we do. Pray during Lent. Fast during Lent. Give alms during Lent. Engaging in these three activities will help to situate us in this holy season.  

The Pillars of Lent

1. Prayer 

The first pillar of Lent is prayer. According to St. John Damascene, “Prayer is the raising of the mind and heart to God or the requesting of good things from God.” To raise the mind and heart to God means to attend to God and to pay attention to him. It is to be aware of God, to seek communion with God in a conscious way. Raising up the mind with all of our consciousness, our attentiveness, our perception, our intellectual ability to God is prayer. But it is also the raising of the heart to God— our passions, our feelings, our emotions, the longing of our soul. To do that in a very explicit and conscious way is to pray. But how do we pray? There are a wide range of ways we can pray. The greatest prayer in the Catholic Church is the Mass. So, for Catholics who drifted away, who stopped attending Sunday Masses, Lent is a great time to return to the Church and start attending at least Sunday Masses. For regular  and active Catholics, you may consider attending the daily Masses during Lent. Due to other commitments you may have, you can strive to attend, let’s say, twice or thrice of daily Masses during Lent. Whatever you are doing with regard to the Mass, raise it a level. Intensify it! And when you are at Mass, enter more deeply into the Mass. Avoid every form of distraction. Pay attention to every word of the Mass. Listen to the sermons and make sure you go home every day with something. Come to Mass with a notebook and a pen so that you can write down the core message of the priest who preached. Another prayer you can say is the Rosary. The rosary is one of the strongest weapons against the devil and his fallen angels. If you have been away from the rosary for a long time, find it. If you don’t have any, buy one. Start praying it at least once or twice or thrice a week during Lent. If your mind wonders away, bring it back. My recommendation is that you pray it everyday, if you can. You can also pray this prayer: “Jesus, Son of the living God, have mercy on me.” Another one I will recommend is this: “Jesus I love you, all I have is yours. Yours I am, and yours I want to be. Do with me whatever you will.” You can pray any of these prayers over and over again for five minutes or ten minutes or fifteen minutes regularly during Lent. You can even use the rosary to count as you pray them. Allow it to become part of your rhythm of breathing. During Lent, we can also do devotional prayers like Stations of the Cross. Go to your local church and be part of this beautiful prayer. Do holy hour as well. Spend a few minutes with Jesus adoring him in the Blessed Sacrament. Keep him company. If you have nothing to say to him, just sit there quietly for five, ten, fifteen or one hour. He may say something to you. Getting in touch with your own sinfulness is also a form of prayer. Whenever you are before the Lord, confess. I know there is sacramental confession, but even after that, remember to acknowledge before the Lord that you are a sinner. Ask him to help you deal with your inadequacies. I do this all the time. The most regular prayer I say to God is the prayer of confession and seeking for his mercy. Before you sleep, find at a few minutes to review your day. Thank God for all the blessings of the day and beg him for pardon for sins committed and for the good not done, like the works of charity that we ignored. During Lent, we pray with intentionality in order to know Jesus as our Voice. 

2. Fasting

The second pillar of Lent is fasting. Today, a lot of people engaging in fasting for all sorts of reasons. Fasting is becoming popular today— there is intermittent fasting for various health benefits like losing weight, controlling blood sugar, and body building benefits. I have been doing intermittent fasting for quite sometime now. I break my fast sometime around 1 PM or 2 PM. But from religious perspective, we fast during Lent in order to know Jesus as our greatest Treasure. We tend to attach to created things. We make them godlike in our life and take exaggerated importance. When this happens, it is good to sometimes actively detach oneself from them, so as to find what the soul really wants. The soul can easily be caught up in secondary goods that it begins to forget what it really wants. If someone is constantly seeking for sensual pleasure, the person can easily forget that the soul wants something other than that. The human person is longing for God. St. Augustine said that it is only in God that our soul is finally at rest. So, Lent is a wonderful time to set aside all sensual pleasures in order to give the soul a chance to find what it is seeking for, what it is wired for and also to allow a deeper hunger to emerge. Fasting has nothing to do with puritanism, or platonism, or dualism. It does not mean that we Catholics hate pleasure. Christians love the world and everything in it because God loves the world. We love food and drink . However, they can become so dominant that we forget the deepest longing of the heart. So, we fast so as to allow that spiritual hunger to emerge. If we allow our sensual pleasures to dominate us, we start craving for all kinds of things, even things we don’t really need or want. Fasting is a wonderful way to rediscover the deepest and inner yearning of the heart. Like I said before, it is not puritanism or platonism, rather a spiritual cleansing to allow the deepest craving of the heart to come out.   

The minimum requirement of the Church on Catholics in terms of Lenten fasting is to fast on Ash Wednesday and Good Friday and to abstain from meat on all Fridays. Here in America, fasting is defined as one small meal and a couple of snacks. But can we do more than the minimum requirement? Yes we can! There is something about fasting that accomplishes a lot. You cannot go into a spiritual warfare with the devil without adding fasting to your prayer. Jesus himself said that there are certain demons that are expelled only by prayer and fasting. Today, we hardly talk about demons and other possessive spirits. Some of us here don’t even believe that they exist. But when you look around us, what do we see? All sorts of additions. If you are addicted to anything— food, hard liquor, drugs, pornography, masturbation, sex etc I want you, from today to see it as a possession. Your enemy, the devil wants to use your addition to destroy your life, deny you of regular communion with God on earth and deny you of heaven as well. In this holy season, I urge you to fast. Fast from screens like TV. Do not spend your entire day watching TV. Find something in your life that you are giving too much attention to, fast from it and shift your attention to God and God’s matters. During Lent, we fast in order to know Jesus as our Food. 

3. Almsgiving 

The third and final pillar of Lent is almsgiving. But what is the connection between almsgiving and spiritual life? Most people can easily connect fasting and prayer to spiritual life because of their obvious fruits. But what about almsgiving? How does almsgiving help our souls? The heart of the spiritual life is caritas— love, which means willing the good of the other and doing something about it. Almsgiving is a very concrete way to will the good of the other. There are a lot of poor people around us. In the Gospel, Jesus says, “The poor you will always have with you” (Matt. 26:11). We will never be able to eradicate poverty and get rid of the poor around us. They are there to remind us of the injustice in our society, of inequality, and of unbalanced structure of our world. But there is something else they remind us— Jesus in our midst. But if you cannot find Jesus in them, at least say to yourself, “That’s me over there but for the grace of God.” 

In the season of Lent, make effort to help the poor. Give some of your money to them. Give something of value to the poor. Prayer ultimately is meant to give rise to charity and fasting is meant to give rise to charity because it leads more deeply to God who is Caritas (Love) Almsgiving really heightens our sense of solidarity within the mystical body; that we are connected with each other. We cannot say to someone who is suffering that it is their problem. I am not worried about it. No! It’s our problem. St. Thomas Aquinas said that everyone in principle is meant to be part of the mystical body of Christ. So, anyone, and anywhere who suffers is our brother and sister. Almsgiving is one way of demonstrating it in a very vivid way. A few examples for practicing almsgiving during Lent includes giving more money to the church during offertory collection, giving a good tip to that young lady or young man who served your meal in a restaurant, giving money to charity organizations like Mary’s Place, Catholic Charity, St. Vincent de Paul etc. Give generously and do not complain. Abandon yourself to God’s providence a little bit more. Get a charity box or poor box and resolve that for the entire 40 days of Lent, you will daily put a dollar or a quarter dollar in it. At the end of the Lenten season, bring the money to the church for the care of the poor among us. Remember that in the faces of the poor we see Jesus and whoever feeds the poor, clothes the poor, and attend to the needs of the poor is doing all of that to Jesus himself. And Jesus promises that when you come to his Father’s house, he will remember.