Another Lent is nearly upon us, and with it comes one of the great Catholic questions: What are you doing for Lent? The spiritual practices of prayer, fasting, and almsgiving come back into focus during the forty-day sprint to the Easter mysteries. How should we approach the Lenten season? Is it better to try something heroic, something truly difficult, or to stick with something simpler and more attainable? Perhaps the more important thing is the way in which we approach whatever practices we decide to attempt. Two figures from Church history, Pelagius and Cornelius Jansen, provide cautionary tales as we embark upon yet another Lent.
Pelagius was a British monk and contemporary of St. Augustine in the late third and early fourth centuries A.D. who promoted a version of Christianity that emphasized human choice while denying original sin. The Pelagian worldview is one in which man is basically good and is capable on his own, without the help of grace, to choose the good. Without original sin and its pesky residue concupiscence to weigh us down and blur our intellect, we can achieve salvation just fine on our own. It just takes some effort.
Our Lenten practices can slide in Pelagianism when we think they all depend on us and our efforts without the help of grace. How often do we get a few weeks into Lent and either feel good because our efforts are working and we’ve been able to keep up our Lenten disciplines or we feel like we have failed and need to try harder? Our success or failure at sticking with a particular discipline has little to do with how hard we try and more to do with how well we respond to God’s grace which always comes before our effort. It can be tempting to think that if we just find the right thing to do or not to do for Lent, we will make ourselves holier by Easter. But the truth of the matter is the Lord is the one who makes us holy, and he is also the one who makes our effort fruitful. Our effort is necessary, only because he has chosen to make it so, but our effort is not sufficient. Without grace, the best of our Lenten disciplines is nothing more than “a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal” (1 Corinthians 13:1). We need the Lord to make Lent fruitful; we can’t do it ourselves.
Cornelius Jansen was a Dutch bishop in the early sixteenth century who developed a theological movement with striking similarities to Calvinism. Jansenism, as this movement became known, plagued the Church, especially in France, for several centuries. Jansen and his followers were appalled at the lack of spiritual rigor they saw among the faithful, and so they wanted to hold the faithful to a higher standard than what the Church actually required. Contrition, sorrow for one’s sins even if it arises from a fear of hell (imperfect contrition), is necessary for sacramental Confession to work, and so the Jensenists taught that only contrition motivated solely by love of God with no admixture of the fear of hell (perfect contrition) was sufficient for the sacrament to take away sins. Being in a state of grace and desiring to receive Communion is all that is needed to receive the Eucharist, and so the Janensists taught that everyone must prepare rigorously and thoroughly to receive the Eucharist, so much so that most of us just should not receive at all. Ultimately, the Janenists denied even the Church’s authority to regulate such matters. The Jansenist always knows better than the Church.
Our Lenten practices can tend toward Jansenism when we seek to go beyond what the Church requires of us. In the end, Jansenism ends up in the same place as Pelagianism, with the false idea that it depends upon me to make myself worthy of the Lord. If the Church defines fasting as one large meal and two small ones, then I’ll just eat once. If the Church does not count Sundays in Lent as days of discipline, I will keep up my Lenten discipline then. If the Church proscribes a forty-day preparation for Easter, I’ll make it a ninety-day preparation. It is as if I’ll try to do so much more for God than is necessary, that it will have to result in spiritual growth, in more grace, in God’s acceptance. But we cannot earn God’s love or his grace or even our own holiness, no matter how rigorous of fasting and no matter how much we pray.
To be clear, there is nothing inherently wrong with fasting from warm showers, coffee, TV, alcohol, music, or whatever else you want to give up. Many of those things are very naturally fruitful and even healthy. There is nothing wrong with reading the Bible more, praying the Rosary, or joining a new prayer challenge on Hallow. But we should not reduce the Church’s Lenten disciplines to a Catholic New Year’s resolution. Resolutions depend upon us and our efforts, on being disciplined and determined, on pushing through to make the habit stick. While there are some similarities, Lent is more about making space for the Lord who has been knocking at our hearts all year long and more.
In some ways, the simpler discipline might be more spiritually beneficial than the big lift precisely because of its simplicity. It doesn’t depend on a monumental effort on our part to make it worthwhile. Rather it depends on the Lord’s grace, and our cooperation with it, to be fruitful. As we prepare for this Lent, may the Lord guide us to the discipline, large or small, that he wants to use to expand our hearts and set us free.
