Many years ago one of my seminary professors pointed out that the Church's liturgical year moves in a spiral, not circular, fashion. The celebration of major feasts and seasons is not simply a re-play of the previous year's observances because we ourselves are always at a different point in life.
To paraphrase Ebenezer Scrooge in Charles Dickens's classic novel, A Christmas Carol, we are not the persons we were from one year to the next. Whatever the circumstances of life, we can and do change --- for the better, as in Mr. Scrooge's case, or for the worse.
Another professor of mine once asked the class what we first thought of when we heard the word, "Lent." The usual suspects came rapidly to the surface, with penance, self-denial and fasting in the lead. But our teacher was not satisfied. When it became obvious that the correct answer was not forthcoming, he almost shouted the word, "spring."
He was not off the mark, by any means. The Middle English word for Lent, lenten, means springtime. Lent, like spring itself, signals a time of re-birth, particularly at Easter.
To be sure, linking Lent with springtime is seasonally appropriate in the Northern Hemisphere, but Christians in Australia, for example, would be heading into autumn, not spring, with winter close behind.
To our North American minds, Australians must have an even more challenging task in celebrating Christmas at the beginning of their summer, without any gently falling snow and wintry holiday music to create the "proper" Yuletide atmosphere.
We are approaching yet another Ash Wednesday, when blessed ashes are applied to the forehead as a sign of our need for penance and as a reminder of the limits of our lives on this earth. Although two prayer-formulae are now allowed for the distribution of ashes, the more traditional one, with which older Catholics are especially familiar, is "Remember, you are dust, and to dust you will return."
In the fourth century, when public penance for serious sins was common, penitents dressed in sackcloth and were sprinkled with ashes to show their repentance. The practice gradually died out (where can one find wearable sackcloth nowadays?), and by the 11th century it had become customary simply to receive ashes on the forehead.
One has the impression that active involvement in the Lenten preparation for Easter has lessened considerably in recent years. Is it the case perhaps that relatively few Catholics are even aware of the direct connection between Lent and Easter, except those actually preparing for entrance into the Church at the Easter Vigil and those assisting with their preparations?
Lent itself has assumed various forms over the centuries --- limited at first to two or three days of fasting, then to Holy Week, and then to three weeks, as was the practice in Rome, and finally reaching the modern span of forty days, patterned after the Lord's fasting for forty days in the desert. The connection between Lent and Easter, however, was always an integral part of the Church's rituals.
Lent, therefore, is not only, or even primarily, a time for sackcloth and ashes, with gloomy dispositions to match. It is ideally still a season of anticipation of the joy of the Resurrection and its promise of re-birth into eternal life.
But such words as these may be little more than religious boiler-plate, as so much religious language is in danger of becoming, if that has not happened already. Good preachers and insightful spiritual writers have sometimes pointed out that the great enemy of faith is not outright rejection but indifference. When we have been "inoculated" with pious words once too often, the linguistic "serum" loses it effect.
As we take personal stock during the coming season of Lent and look back across the Lenten landscape from the heights of Easter, we need to ask ourselves whether that "serum" is still potent or, to change the metaphor and put the matter more biblically, whether the salt has lost its savor (Mark 9:50; Luke 14:34).
If the words and rituals mean less and less as the years pass, the liturgical spiral may be on a downward trajectory. If so, the guilt lies not only with ourselves. Church leadership might also be at fault. The life of the spirit cannot grow in a vacuum, much less in an ecclesiastically toxic environment.
The penance of the season, in preparation for Easter, is not for individual Christians alone, but for church officials, too --- at every level. The ongoing reform of the Church is one of the necessary conditions for the authentic renewal of the spirit.
Like Lent and Easter, they go hand in hand.
Father Richard P. McBrien is the Crowley-O'Brien Professor of Theology at the University of Notre Dame.
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