Lenten Reflections

As Lent passes by to a close once again (Really? Could six weeks have really passed by in such a blur?), I'm tempted to pause among the joyous celebrations of Easter. I look back at all the emotional highs that filled me on Ash Wednesday, at the resolutions of prayer, fasting, and sacrifice, at all of the potential for spiritual growth that this Lent held for me. Of course, not all of those things came into reality. The rosy promise of reform and repentance from ingrained sins and bad habits didn't play out in quite the way that I had expected, but this Lenten season proved to be fruitful in an unforeseen way.

For countless Lents the routine was always the same: as a family, we abstained from watching TV, and each individual then practiced their own private penance in addition to the communal one. It usually involved some variation of sacrificing sweets, computer games, or (the hardest thing in the world for me) extra reading time. This year, with a little extra prayer and a gentle nudge from God, I tried out something new. I sacrificed my day-dreams. Everyone has them, and in mine I took refuge from the dreary realities of Euclid, work-study, and cafeteria food. So I gave them up.

Every time I caught myself daydreaming, I offered a little prayer to God, and tried to think of something else. Theology class. Finding a roommate for next year. Studying props. Doing laundry. Ordinary things that all needed to be done. I tried to ground my mental life in reality, no matter how boring and mundane it was, because God has put me here and now for the purpose of being a good student and daughter with the ultimate goal of reaching heaven one day. Sounds like a noble mission, doesn't it? The problem is, all too often it's far more interesting to indulge in fantasies.

So I ended up learning a lot about myself, where I am spiritually, and just how much I need to rely on God's grace if I'm ever going to accomplish anything worth-while. I am not saying this trying to be modest -- it is the simple and literal truth. Without God's grace, I'd be a spiritual and mental wreck, and life wouldn't be worth living. I constantly need to be reminded of that fact.

Throughout this first year of being away from my family, of being responsible for balancing my life and all that is contained therein, I've come to a much deeper realization of just how easy it is to fall away from God -- not in a dramatic fashion of murder, or another "big" sin, but rather in the temptation to indifference. So many times, it became a choice between studying an extra 30 minutes before math class or going to Mass. A choice between an extra 10 minutes of sleep or a humble and complete morning offering. A sloppy confession squeezed in between work-study and dinner or a well-prepared one in the quiet before Mass. A series of little and seemingly-unimportant decisions accumulated into a semester's-worth of choices and habits, some good and some bad.

I've never been more aware of my spiritual frailty, yet at the same time, I am not filled with despair at the inevitability of failures and sins. In some ways it's just a resignation to the fact that I'm human, and as long as I'm alive here on this earth, losing God's grace through sin is a very real possibility. In another way, this awareness has allowed me to wrap myself more fully in the certitude of God's love for me -- the fact that no matter how many times I sin, over and over again, God will always be there ready to forgive me and shower me with his love and grace. And that is a humbling thought indeed.