Lent 2022

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Before talking about Lent, I want to give thanks to God for the beautiful day on Saturday. That was when my mom, a friend and I went to the Snow Goose Festival in Delta. Earlier in the week we had a winter storm, but Saturday dawned with a clear sky, if frigid temperatures. By the time we got to the Gunnison Reservoir, though, it had warmed enough that we didn’t need our gloves.

When we arrived, a flock of a couple of thousand geese were paddling about within viewing distance. Scarcely had I gotten the spotting scope set up, however, than they took flight. The one large flock split into two, half flying southward while the rest came almost directly overhead, the thrumming of the air displaced by their wings washing over us as we watched in awe. Words cannot express such an experience.

“Saint Francis, faithful to Scripture, invites us to see nature as a magnificent book in which God speaks to us and grants us a glimpse of his infinite beauty and goodness,” Pope Francis writes in his encyclical Laudato Si’; standing there in the winter sunlight on the shore of the reservoir with thousands of birds in the sky above filled me with gladness that the Creator set me, his creature, in such an exquisite world.

“But ask the animals, and they will teach you, or the birds in the sky, and they will tell you; or speak to the earth, and it will teach you, or let the fish in the sea inform you,” the Book of Job exhorts us. What that moment taught me was that the very act of being in nature breathes new life into my soul. I wanted to sing with the psalmist the jubilation of the fields, the joy of the trees of the forest.

The experience with the geese wasn’t the only gift of that day. God, always the profligate giver, had more in store. My mom, my friend and I got a good laugh about a metal Sasquatch in a field, wondered at the majesty of a golden eagle perched on a telephone pole, and enjoyed each other’s company.

All of which was perfect preparation to think about my approach to Lent this year. The penitential season, which began March 2, is a time “to surrender ourselves to prayer and to the reading of Scripture, to fasting and to giving alms” in order to have a true conversion of heart and mind as followers of Christ, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops writes.

My Lenten disciplines are supposed to be kept between me and God, but whatever it is I choose to do, I want it to increase my ability to find joy and God’s presence in my everyday life. I need to discover, through prayer, the impediments that prevent me from experiencing God not only in the sky and the birds but also in my friends and family and (most difficult for me) strangers in the street.

Fasting from large amounts of food is required of all Catholics on Ash Wednesday and Good Friday, but there is also this to consider, from St. John Chrysostom: “Let the mouth fast from foul words and unjust criticism, for what good is it if we abstain from birds and fishes but bite and devour our brothers?”

Almsgiving, too, might be reconsidered, so that it is not a mechanical writing of a check but rather a recognition that those to whom I am giving are my brethren in the Lord.

“Charity unites us to God. ... There is nothing mean in charity, nothing arrogant. Charity knows no schism, does not rebel, does all things in concord. In charity all the elect of God have been made perfect,” Pope Clement I said, and communion with God is what we humans were made for. Our Lenten disciplines help us toward that union.

Marie Mischel is editor of the Intermountain Catholic. Reach her at marie@icatholic.org.