_-_James_Tissot_-_overall.jpg)
Take care not to perform righteous deeds
in order that people may see them;
otherwise, you will have no recompense from your heavenly Father.
Our egos have no interest in giving alms, in prayer, or in fasting. When they are informed that these are things we ought to do they protest and demand an immediate reward. If, they say, we must give up our normal indulgence, we must receive some kind of immediate reward as a repayment. The trouble with all this is not so much that our egos want too much but rather that they are content with too little. We allow ourselves to be sated with the praise of others, to be content as long as we are in some way the object of their attention. And by being sated thus with trivial things we neglect and fail to pursue the true reward and repayment from the Father himself.
But when you give alms,
do not let your left hand know what your right is doing,
so that your almsgiving may be secret.
It isn't so important that we perform almsgiving with absolute stealth such that even forensic investigators could not discover it. What is important is our motive. It's probably better to spend less time considering how we look to others in our almsgiving than to spend too much time thinking about it, either to display it or to hide it. Because even spending a lot of time cleverly disguising it could become a point of pride, a short-term ego reward, sabotaging our full claim in the Father's promised repayment.
When you pray,
do not be like the hypocrites,
who love to stand and pray in the synagogues and on street corners
so that others may see them.
When we pray we are called to be less preoccupied with the external form, and the self-image that accrues to us as a result of that form, a more attentive to the inner room where the Father himself desires to meet us. This inner room as often a hard space to occupy because it is cut off and isolated from the normal bustle of the world, a place where there are none of the short-term ego rewards we often seek, where the existence of any reward at all is finally beyond our control. Our egos hate this lack of control. But if we learn to sit with it, "your Father who sees in secret will repay you". And this repayment is not only at the end of the age. It is precisely in prayer that the Father himself can become our reward, provided we don't settle for less.
When you fast,
do not look gloomy like the hypocrites.
A last resort of the ego is often an attempt to feel pitiful, and thus to draw the pity of others. If it can't appear great and strong and spiritual at least it can make known how very difficult are the sacrifices it is making. Others can then acknowledge the greatness of those sacrifices and also feed it with affection to make up for the loss of those things. But is this really what we want out of fasting? Is it not rather that we would learn to prefer God to the lesser good things of his creation? Let's not going only halfway and become content with something as trivial as pity when God himself desires to be our reward.
We might protest that life seems difficult enough without increasing the difficult by a season of prayer, fasting, and almsgiving. But this a mistaken and worldly attitude. It is precisely because the world is in such a state, and even we ourselves are perhaps struggling, that we need to turn to the Lord for mercy. What we have been doing on our own has not helped, has if anything only contributed to the downward spiral, the vicious cycles drawing men and women down toward their base natures and animal instincts. Our contentment with lesser things has meant that God has even been truly and sincerely asked to help. We have instead tried to make the best of it with our egos. And we ought to see by now that these attempts have failed. This is why the present moment of our world is the perfect, the ideal time to begin another season of Lent.
Spare, O LORD, your people,
and make not your heritage a reproach,
with the nations ruling over them!
Lent is not meant to be a hopeless or sorrowful season. It is a season where the Lord himself desires to captivate us and to capture our hearts, to lure us back from lesser things to the fullness of life that he has always intended for us. This is why Lent is not merely an optional addition for overachievers but something the whole Church walks through together, because the urgency is great, and the promise is something on which we can rely.
Behold, now is a very acceptable time;
behold, now is the day of salvation.
No comments:
Post a Comment