St. Catherine on the Three Pillars of Lent

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Saint Catherine of Siena is proving an excellent companion for this liturgical season, because she speaks of all three of the Lenten pillars: prayer, fasting and almsgiving. She also emphasizes humility, an essential characteristic, for the Church teaches that humility is the foundation of prayer. God told Catherine, “I Am Who Am, and you yourselves are not; rather, you have been made by me, the creator of all things that participate in being,” meaning that human beings were created by God and have nothing except through him. The soul, which Catherine refers to as “she,” must have knowledge of herself, for only by knowing one’s self can one come to know God.

This emphasis on self-knowledge is not Catherine’s alone among the Doctors of the Church; Augustine and Aquinas also wrote on this topic. “Oh God, who art ever the same, let me know myself and Thee,” was a prayer of Augustine, who also criticized those who love truth when it reveals itself but hate truth when it reveals themselves. Prayer reveals the truth, through the examination of self, that “Man is a beggar before God,” as Augustine would say. Or, in Catherine’s words, “He is our God who has no need of us, but we have need of him, for without him we can have nothing.”

The Almighty God has no need of human beings; we were created because “When I looked inside myself, I was enamored by my creature and was pleased to create it,” God told Catherine, as recorded in her book The Dialogue.

We, on the other hand, need God, and only in serving others can we serve God.

In the love of neighbor “all virtues were founded; and … charity gives life to all the virtues, because no virtue can be obtained without charity, which is true love of me,” God told Catherine.

For the Lenten pillar of almsgiving this is as good a reflection as any.

At Lent we wait and watch for the Lord; fasting helps us maintain the discipline to keep vigil against sin. Fasting also exposes our dependence on God. Fasting and other works of bodily mortification teach the soul “how to keep the rein on the body” and help kill the self-love that prevents her from being subject to God’s will rather than her own.

Here Catherine makes a distinction I often miss when fasting at Lent, for I’ve been known to place all efforts into the battle against my body rather than focusing on fasting as a means of destroying my own will. I fall into the trap of fasting “in order to please God the more, and in order to retain him the more in my soul through grace; because it seems to me that I should possess him more, and serve him better in that way than in this,” as Catherine writes.

The error of this way of thinking is that I can’t earn God’s grace by fasting or any other means; I can only prepare my soul to receive it should he deign to grant it.

Finally, we come to the Lenten pillar of prayer, a topic to which Catherine devotes an entire treatise. “By humble, continual, and faithful prayer, the soul acquires, with time and perseverance, every virtue,” God tells Catherine.

Prayer “is a weapon with which the soul can defend herself from every adversity, if grasped with the hand of love, by the arm of free choice in the light of the Holy Faith,” Catherine writes, but she warns against giving heed “to nothing except completing Psalms and saying many pater nosters” and, once these prayers are said, not thinking of anything else. Rather, as God tells Catherine, a person while praying “should endeavor to elevate her mind in my love, with the consideration of her own defects and of the Blood of my only-begotten Son, wherein she finds the breadth of my charity and the remission of her sins. And this she should do, so that self-knowledge and the consideration of her own defects should make her recognize my goodness in herself and continue her exercises with true humility.”

Here we come full circle, returning to humility, which is the foundation of prayer, and to the goodness of God within us that leads to charity, and to fasting, which reveals our dependence on God.

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