We are knee-deep in Lent, and it seemed only right to pause for a moment and think about that. This may well be the only place you’ll read any sort of reflection in a secular press, and it is a testament to the Tega Cay Sun that it tolerates Comus as much as it does. Lent is, of course, the most sacred of Christian seasons, even more so than Christmas. It’s been too hard, one supposes, to make much of a merchandise of the Resurrection, but I’m sure some will continue to try.
We don’t spend as much time thinking about Lent as we do about Christmas. After all, a baby in the manger is a more beautiful image than a dying God on the cross. It isn’t as if one can place an Easter Bunny at the foot of the cross the way we do a kneeling Santa at the manger. Surely someone will try, but the very thought grates on sensibilities. Lent is a somber time, not lugubrious, but somber. It’s a time for reflection, a time to think about eternal things rather than decorated trees, sparkling lights, and an abundance of gifts. But the reflections we have about Lent are somber because they inevitably lead us to our mortality. For most of us, that’s a hard pill to swallow.
I mention this obvious fact because we should take time to reflect, to reconsider ourselves, what we do, what we have done, and where in the scheme of things that leads us to reshape and to refashion who we are. What should trouble all of us is the fact that Lent, were it not for a handful of souls, would be entirely forgotten as a downer, a kill-joy moment.
Attendance at church or the synagogue has indeed fallen precipitously in the last few decades, and that does contribute to the avoidance of Lent. Yes, there is a resurgence among a small minority, but it isn’t always a resurgence of what our forefathers would have called faith. It smacks of a kind of pantheism or universalism. St. Augustine rejected what was then called apokatastasis, or the belief that everything would come out in the wash just fine. Rather, his was a stronger beer, one that relied on divine grace rather than human endeavor. Most moderns do not like that idea. We have become more of a Thomas Anthony Harris school of thought: I’m Okay-You’re Okay. But Christian teaching is more of the school of thought that we’re not okay. We are, as the theologians called centuries ago, a piacular people, a people in need of redemption.
It was just this thought that led to the whole Christian enterprise becoming the glue, the esemplastic, as Coleridge called it, that held society together. It has been that way from the beginning. John Adams, our second president after Washington, knew this especially. In writing to the Massachusetts militia, he warned, “Because We have no Government armed with Power capable of contending with human Passions unbridled by morality and Religion. Avarice, Ambition, Revenge or Gallantry, would break the strongest Cords of our Constitution as a Whale goes through a Net. Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” [emphasis added.] Adams’s point is well taken. Seventy-five years ago, most people acted as if this were true. They may not have held to the belief that Augustine did, or Adams did, or even to Christian principles as outlined in Scripture, but they acted as if they were true.
The decline in our culture may not be entirely owing to this loss, but I think it’s safe to say that much of what has transpired over the last fifty years has a lot to do with it. Think back only a decade and a half ago. Would you ever have thought we not only would have males who think they are females, but that we would have them in Congress, in churches, and in competition against biological women? This is a stark example, but there are many others. Walk behind a few twenty-somethings and see how long it takes before the f-bomb is thrown, and not once or twice, but as if it were punctuation. One cannot go on social media without seeing almost immediately someone haranguing us with such billingsgate that much of what they say is unintelligible.
But I digress. The headpiece comes from a medieval Latin hymn, the Dies Irae, in a chant from the Requiem Mass in Catholic liturgy. Yes, okay, dragging out something from the medieval period may seem to some pedantic and obfuscating. But such literature is very sobering. C. S. Lewis, the great apologist and medievalist, writes in his autobiography, Surprised by Joy, that while he rejected his faith, his pursuit of Medieval literature brought him back to it, even if kicking and screaming. While Comus is not Catholic, the hymn is a great Lenten reminder. The complete line runs, “Mors stupebit et natura/Cum resurget creatura/Judicanti responsura. Death and nature will be astonished/When all creation rises again/To answer the Judge.
Think on these things.
