We are well into the season of Lent, a beautiful but difficult season in the Catholic liturgical year, set aside for prayer and repentance. With the ashes long washed away from our foreheads, we've all probably broken our personal penances at least once or twice by now. I freely admit that I have. Repentance gets old really fast, and it's something that I think is all too often misunderstood in contemporary society. All too often it is practiced solely by focusing on one's own sinfulness or shortcomings, and what penances or diets-disguised-as-fasts we can perform to correct those shortcomings ourselves.
What most people don't realize is that repentance has little to do with self improvement, if anything. It is an admittance of our shortcomings, true enough, and it is based on contrition and a genuine desire to become better than what we are. But the way I see it, repentance is less about picking ourselves up by our own bootstraps and more about turning ourselves back to God and recognizing how little we truly have, how incapable we are separated from him, how dependent we are on his grace.
There is no better time for this sort of recognition than those moments when we seemingly lose everything. Becoming truly, direly poor is a foreign experience for many of us, but we've all had some taste of it. We have all suffered loss. It could be material like the loss of a job, our home, our life's savings, any source of visible security we didn't realize we needed to sleep well at night till it was gone. We could suffer the loss of our good reputation and lose our sense of security in social ways. Worse still, it could be the loss of a loved one, either through a severed relationship, or through death. With any such loss, in a sense, we become poor; we lose our sense of self-sufficiency and autonomy. We are reduced, brought so low. We are humbled. It is painful and terrifying; we've been well trained by the world to avoid such loss at all costs. This is why I love today's first reading in particular, for it beautifully illustrates sincere repentance, and in no small terms, either.
Azariah finds himself in quite a dramatic state of bitter loss in the first reading. The people of God are in exile in Babylon, far from the home God had given them, and stripped of all the things with which they had fulfilled their purpose as God's people: worship of God. Jerusalem and the glorious Temple of Solomon are destroyed. The throne of David, prophesied to one day belong to the Son of God, is unoccupied. Their high and holy feast days and temple sacrifices have ceased, for they have nowhere to offer them, no one to offer them, and in their captivity, nothing to offer. They have been utterly, grievously, reduced. Even their means of restoring favor with God has been taken away. Not to mention, Azariah is making this plea to God in the fiery furnace of Nebuchadnezzar. He has personally been reduced to the point of losing his life. Few people are in a better position to recognize their total dependence on God than he.
This is why he is able to give one of the most heartfelt prayers of repentance found in Scripture. He prays both on behalf of himself and his people. All he has left to offer God is a "humble heart and contrite spirit," one who can clearly see its desperate need for its creator. His only hope, and ours, is for the Lord to be mindful of his love and faithfulness to us, to remember his mercy. This mercy is infinitely abundant; God is always ready, always desperate, to fill the empty, reduced lives we offer him with this superabundant mercy. All he waits for is our heartfelt request for it.
I invite you to join me this Lent in sincere repentance, in renouncing the assumed autonomy and self-sufficiency we thought we had, and to invite unending Mercy to do with our lives what we could never possibly do on our own: transform them with Divine Grace.
May God bless you, and may you always be amazed by his Love.
