AT THE BEGINNING OF Lent, we were ready for conversion. We heeded the Church’s invitation to “Repent and believe in the Gospel,” and discerned what Lenten disciplines we would take up. Now, as we are more than halfway through Lent and approach Holy Week, we may be assessing our progress—or lack of it. To our surprise, we keep encountering our own brokenness and weakness. Temptations, attacks from the enemy, a culture that does not encourage Christian virtue and our own weariness in choosing something greater than our passing whims and pleasures all wear down our resolve, and eventually we find ourselves running out of willpower. When this happens, we instinctively begin to measure ourselves by judging our progress and condemning ourselves for our failures.
Recently, my spiritual director offered some helpful advice in this regard. He noted that we tend to look at our lives the way an accountant reviews a balance sheet. Our virtuous habits, strengths and acts of service are viewed as assets. When we are faithful to prayer and our daily duties, loving toward our neighbors and disciplined in our Lenten practices, we feel like good disciples of Jesus. We believe we are useful and capable of doing good things for Him. However, sometimes we get trapped in the lie that what we do for Jesus determines how He sees us. On the other hand, we also judge our weaknesses, struggles and failures as liabilities, that is, the parts of ourselves we believe diminish our worth or stand as barriers to God’s love. Any area where we feel that we “should be better by now,” becomes a place of shame and self-condemnation, and we falsely believe that Jesus views us through this same lens.
The good news is that for Jesus, nothing in our life is a liability. He sees everything in us as an asset. Everything in our human experience, our history, memories, feelings, struggles and even our resistance, is a place where Jesus can encounter us. We can be with Him “in all these things” because He has gone before us, entered into every dimension of our humanity and suffered all things for us and with us. “For we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but one who has similarly been tested in every way, yet without sin.” (Heb. 4:15)
The truth is that desolation and temptation are places where we meet Jesus in His own resistance to them. While we may feel the urge to give up or run away from our struggles, Jesus calls us to acknowledge and embrace our weakness and move forward with Him. The victory is already won in Him. We are called to pick up our cross, entrust our poverty to His mercy and ask for the courage to start over again.
Lenten disciplines are not about following a program of self-improvement; they are at the service of discipleship, which is a relationship with Jesus. We are called to live our lives in Him and allow Him to live His life in us. In this relationship, Jesus does not treat us as projects to be fixed but as people to be loved. He wants to abide with us, especially in places where we feel most unlovable. Seeing ourselves as Jesus sees us reveals our true identity.