Lent and love are in the air.
Some might think these are opposite concepts, but there is wonderful opportunity in Ash Wednesday and St. Valentine’s Day sharing the same date this year.
If you are married or preparing for marriage, maybe you can seek to live out this Lent in a special way through devotion to growing closer to the Lord through your spouse or future spouse.
Love and sacrifice go hand in hand, much like St. Valentine’s Day and the first day of this 40-day penitential season of Lent. Why would Jesus sacrifice himself for us if not for the deepest, most profound love ever known? And what is the foundation of every act of love within the sacrament of marriage if not that same Christ-like love?
It’s popular these days to see clips online from proposals or weddings where the couples declare that they are each other’s “everything.” When I hear this, I often wonder if those couples believe in God, because if one’s spouse is the all-encompassing focus of the other spouse, where is there room for God?
According to the late Venerable Bishop Fulton Sheen, author of Three to Get Married, it is actually a natural inclination, though a mistaken one, for men and women to search for complete fulfillment in each other because their hearts are searching for complete fulfillment in God. Thus, it is the vocation of Christan spouses to bring each other to God. “Remember, no human being in the world is love,” said Sheen. “God is love. Your partner is a fraction, God alone is the whole.”
“Lovers who have nothing else to do but love each other soon find there is nothing else,” said Sheen. The popular 20th-century American bishop, prolific speaker and author offered some grand nuggets of wisdom in his book on marriage. The title really says it all. For a marriage to be sacramental, that is, a means of grace, there has to be three involved: husband, wife and God.
Let’s think about the wedding feast of Cana, where Jesus performed his first miracle. Surely Jesus chose a wedding as the context of his first miracle because the vocation of marriage is how the majority of people live out their lives, and thereby the means by which they are to get to heaven. Also, it seems clear that Jesus is showing us that the divine must be present in every marriage union – three to get married.
Another way to think about the idea of love/Lent and the rule of three is the traditional Lenten trio of almsgiving, fasting and prayer and how they apply to both marriage and the Lenten journey. Both Lent and marriage require complete giving of material goods and self, along with a deep spiritual commitment. If one cannot commit to almsgiving, fasting and prayer to one’s spouse, how can one commit to the same on a larger scale?
It’s true that in Lent the Church is asking us to reach beyond our families and comfort zones to serve others. However, our performing of these deeds does not mean much if we simply turn them on and off again for 40 days every year and do not reflect those same practices at home on a more regular basis. Sacrifice and prayer are essential components of a good marriage every day of the year.
With the onslaught of social media, it seems that Lent and marriage can both be rather showy. Bishop Sheen said, “What some people love is not a person, but the experience of being in love.” I think the same could be said for the three tenets of fasting, almsgiving and prayer. With spiritual apps and YouTube channels competing for our attention, it can seem that sometimes our motivation for completing our Lenten duties is not to conform ourselves to God’s will and empty ourselves or serve others, but, rather, to get recognition for doing those things, or at that very least, to check off a to-do list.
The answer is to turn to Christ, who showed us through his 40-day journey in the desert and his subsequent passion how a spouse is supposed to love. Did he not show us how to humble oneself to the point of total surrender to God’s will, which leads to overwhelming joy at Easter?
The wedding feast at Cana may not be on the cover of any Valentine’s cards at your local drugstore, and Bishop Sheen’s Three to Get Married probably won’t accompany any vases of red roses and boxes of chocolates, but maybe having the two days match up can give us some good food for thought about love and Lent and how the two are inextricably linked.
Lazzuri writes from her home in Nova Scotia, where she lives with her husband, six children, and her mom. She can be reached at [email protected].
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