The desert experience of the people of Israel was a difficult time of testing and penance, of getting lost and discovering the way, as the Lord sought to mould them into His covenant people.
Yet the later prophets looked back on it as the honeymoon period in the people’s relationship with the Lord. The most beautiful of these prophetic evocations is the one we find in Hosea 2, which speaks of the Lord luring His people back into the wilderness, speaking tenderly to them there, betrothing them to Himself for ever, and giving them “a door of hope”.
In Lent we seek to return to the desert, to “turn back” to our own honeymoon experience in our relationship with God. We follow in the footsteps of the people, and of Jesus too, who gives us the 40-day period in which we offer our own hearts to be tested, to see whether in fact, and how deeply, we love God with heart and soul and might. How healthy is my relationship with God? That is the question as we begin the season of Lent.
We can put the same question regarding the health of the Church as a whole. Is it the best of times, with Pope Francis’s synodal process offering the possibility of another springtime? Or is it the worst of times, the Church fatally hit below the waterline by waves of abuse, struggling against a dominant secularism, perhaps even on the verge of another schism?
It is clearly not an easy time to be a Catholic. Many people have given up the practice of their faith, disillusioned, disappointed and scandalised. Many seek to continue to live as Christians and as spiritually alive people, but the institutional body of the Church is struggling. Some of its difficulties stem from the fact that it is an “institutional body”, a structured community of human beings.
It is an earthen vessel made up of sinners who seem to be just as easily moved by the desires for power, pleasure and possessions as are any other people in the world. There is hope, however, in embracing this reality, in sharing the life of this community, because while it is clearly an earthen vessel it nevertheless carries a wonderful treasure.
The only good reason for being a Catholic is because one comes to see that, in spite of its weaknesses, the Church carries a treasure which cannot be accessed otherwise, a treasure that is redeeming and sanctifying of the greater “institutional body” that is the whole of humanity.
Jesus came to establish the “Kingdom of God” through His teaching and the mysteries of His death and resurrection. To belong to the community of the Church, sharing its life, means living already in that Kingdom while waiting for it to be fully revealed.
For now, the first thing to be done by those seeking to give an account of the hope they find in Catholicism is simply to present the treasure the Church carries. This is in answer to questions such as, “Why would anybody in their right mind continue to be involved with that organisation?” It can only be because something of eternal significance is glimpsed there.
It was in the breaking of the bread that the disciples recognised Jesus. It is still in the moments of breaking – preaching breaks down, prayer becomes dry, theology runs out, institutions fail – that we see the light of the Kingdom shining through. And in the desert the light breaking through is more easily seen, more deeply appreciated.
Once again we set out on the journey of Lent. Observed well, Lent is part of that process of maturing in faith which each person must undergo, integrating the elements of healthy religion, institutionally, intellectually and spiritually. The complex reality of Catholicism seeks to put all this together: sin and grace, reason and faith, prayer and spirituality, contemplation and liturgical celebration, authority and obedience, justice and charity.
What we glimpse through the door of hope at the beginning of Lent is the light of Easter. With hearts, minds and eyes purified we encounter the Risen Lord in the community of his disciples, in the rituals of baptism, the Mass, and the other sacraments, in those seeking knowledge and wisdom, and in every human person.
The Church is all about Christ: it is His body. It is all about the Holy Spirit: the love poured into our hearts. It is, in the end, all about the Father, the faceless one of the Blessed Trinity who is sought in all spiritual and mystical quests.
It is the one we call the Father who has first sought us, to mould us into His covenanted people. The Church, in its richest definition, is simply this: a pilgrim people, being brought into unity, from the unity of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit.
The reflections shared here are more fully developed in “The Spirit of Catholicism” (Bloomsbury, 2023) by Vivian Boland OP.
Photo: A British soldier from the B Squadron of the Light Dragoons Regiment, with a tattoo of Jesus Christ on his back, during counter-Taliban operations in the desert, Helmand Province, Afghanistan, 22 May 2007. (Photo by Marco Di Lauro/Getty Images.)
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