Slouching toward Gethsemane with Johnny Cash – Catholic World Report

As we head toward Laetare Sunday, many of us are feeling rather discouraged by the inconstancy of our Lenten disciplines. We woke up on Ash Wednesday piously determined to pray the Rosary every day, or say the Office each morning, or make it to daily Mass at lunchtime.

Or perhaps we made a firm purpose to abstain from alcohol, tobacco, or superfluous snacks or libations. This year, we said, we are taking fasting seriously, and not merely on Ash Wednesday and Good Friday. Or maybe we made a commitment to visit shut-ins, contribute to St. Vincent de Paul Society, or serve a meal at the local Catholic Worker House.

But after three weeks of Lent, we have fallen well short of our ambitious plans, failing and faltering in what we have done and failed to do. Rather than striding penitently and consistently through Lent, we have stumbled and fumbled, forgetting this prayer intention or failing to find time for that corporal work of mercy. As such, we might feel that our Lent is a failure, regretting that we are not faithful or pious enough even to manage our mild ascetic ambitions. Sincere as our intentions were, once again we have not kept them. We have, we think, failed again.

If this describes you, take heart. It is not a failed Lent. Or it need not be.

If we can incorporate our personal shortcomings into the very liturgical and spiritual purpose of Lent, then perhaps our inconstancy is actually at the service of Lent’s proper purpose. If the purpose of Lent is to teach us anything, it is that we are incapable of sustaining our moral, spiritual, and religious commitments by ourselves. And our failure to keep the letter of our proposed discipline is, in fact, part of the very point of Lent. Discrete failures can be the means toward a very successful Lent, because these failures illustrate our very dependency on God’s unfailing grace and mercy.

Johnny Cash’s simple, lovely song, “I Came to Believe,” captures this idea. In the first of only two verses, the narrator laments,

I couldn’t manage the problems I laid on myself
And it just made it worse when I laid them on somebody else
So I finally surrendered it all brought down in despair
I cried out for help and I felt a warm comforter there

When we feel that we have failed in our Lenten disciplines, the reason is often that we have tried to maintain them by ourselves. We are prone to forget that we cannot even do the things we want to do without the sustenance of God’s grace.

Rather than see even our very acts of penance or charity as dependent on God, we implicitly rely on our own autonomous effort. But of course this is to forget that “God is at work within [us], both to will and to work for his good pleasure” (Phil. 2:13).

Ironically, in our sincere efforts to enter into an active penitential season, we tend to forget that we are repenting from the false assertion of autonomy—that is, “self rule”—at the heart of our need for redemption.

In the second chapter of Genesis, God explained to the man and woman in the Garden of Eden—that is, us—that we are not the source of all that is good and that we are not autonomous moral actors. To be sure, we are given a great abundance of good things to use and enjoy. But the tree of the knowledge of good and evil is the symbol of our ultimate dependence upon God for all things.

Our moral lives are a participation in the eternal mind of God, as St. Augustine put it. In the third chapter of Genesis, the man and woman (again, read: you and I) rejected that dependence in a declaration of moral autonomy. We pretend to replace the Creator with the creature. And, of course, the result is that we are shut off from the very paradise in and for which we were meant to enjoy. Expelled and locked out of paradise, we suffer the natural effect of our unnatural assertion of autonomy.

The quest, then, is to return to paradise. But before we can return to Eden, we must go through Gethsemane.