Newspaper Columns by Bishop Paul V. Marshall
Explore new territory: cultivate virtue against the grain
By Bishop Paul V. Marshall
February, 2005Before everyone has tidied up from their Super Bowl parties, Lent will be here: Ash Wednesday, just a few days away.
I like Lent. I like slowing down, focusing, simplifying, reading and praying more while talking less. Lent never fails to bring me hard questions, some acutely painful, that tune my soul for Easter’s shout of new reality.
Writing, preaching, or teaching about Lent, however, is dangerous work. Nothing is more damaging to the soul than a too intense concern with other people's sins or even with their apparent need for what we tactfully call “growth.” To write or speak about what someone else should do in Lent may lead to forgetting that one is also from the dust and is most certainly headed back that way.
Lent's first call is to focus on the battle fought in one’s own soul. For me that means asking how I am doing with Jesus’ summary of the law (Matthew 22: 36-40). What in or about me gets in the way of loving God and loving my neighbor as myself?
Then there is the question of responsibility. In a culture that emphasizes rights and self-serving reasons and denials more than responsibilities, we might easily avoid looking hard at our motives and behavior. Many of us can point to how we have been deeply wounded or conditioned by circumstances not of our making. So how can any of this be my fault?
For all of us, life is made up of paradoxes. Chief among these is the reality that while each of us is the result of our parents' genes and the upbringing they and others gave us, what we make of that background is our responsibility. There is a space between stimulus and response, Stephen Covey has said, where we can reinvent ourselves and our world by the choices we make.
Each of us is beset by a different set of opportunities, challenges and temptations. It is not surprising that in the ashes I find it written that I may do certain pretty good deeds because they interest me. I may do some because I was taught to do them as a child. Some are downright fun; some even scratch an inner itch. Beyond that, I may find that I do not commit some sins because they do not interest me very much or because they have ceased to interest me. That is not a picture of virtue, nor is it license to raise an eyebrow at those who are drawn to those sins I do not commit or are not drawn to those good works I sometimes practice.
Lent builds spiritual muscle in the resistance to those sins my background and experience do incline me to commit, even if it is not my fault that I am shaped that way. Even more, Lent builds virtue as I put on and try out those acts and attitudes that do not interest me in the least.
I find it useful in Lent to do the hard work of exploring new territory, cultivating virtue against the grain. The death to self involved in leaving the bad or embracing the good draws me to Christ, both in his agony and in his new life. The heightened awareness of his walking beside me on this 40-day journey is perhaps why I like Lent so much in the first place.
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