If you have so kindly included visiting my blog(s) during your personal life’s journey in this sacred season of Lent, you may remember, meditative reader, that for Ash Wednesday, March 9, 2011, I posted about the significance of the day called “Ash Wednesday” and the season of Lent itself. As some thing of a shorthand, I referred to Lent as a holy season of two “p’s” – preparation (for the coming and arrival of the Easter observance and celebration) and penance (the sacred process and experience of turning one’s mind, spirit, and even body, away from sin against God and others, and back toward love and communion with God and others).
Today, March 27, 2011, calendar-watching reader, marks the 3rd Sunday in the Lenten season of 46 days that always includes 6 Sundays (which, again, are not really days of penance – since Sunday is always understood as a “day of resurrection” and sacred “celebration” – and therefore doesn’t count as part of the 40 days of Lent). After today, we will be halfway through those half-dozen Sundays. So how goes it with your spiritual journey this Lenten season? Are you doing anything in regard to the “two p’s?”
That concept of preparation can connect with most Christian people, I think, and even some non-Christian, other religious tradition, non-religious or secular, folks. God knows (quite literally), there’s a lot about the approach of Easter that is not particularly religious, not having to do with faith or spirituality….but is just fun and enjoyable and may, in fact, call for planning and preparation. Other than the threat of too much candy and calories, who doesn’t love Easter baskets (well, there is the post-Easter plague of bits of cellophane “grass” that lie around for weeks, sometimes mixing in with the leftover needles from the last Christmas tree), chocolate bunnies, Cadbury eggs (okay, let a personal addiction slip out), jelly beans, large chocolate-covered Easter egg cakes, and a host of other such delights. A definite amount of shopping, buying and planning gets involved in those preparations (had to hunt a bit for Cadbury eggs).
Easter preparations may involve family gatherings, perhaps making a reservation for one of those sumptuous Easter buffets that many fine restaurants will host on Sunday, April 24, or maybe a traditional Easter ham or leg of lamb to be bought and prepared. If you are on the White House program staff – or a community programming person for any number of cities and towns across the United States – you may be well underway in planning and preparations for an Easter Egg Roll or “hunt.”
And if you, fun-loving reader, make the White House event one of your annual “must do” activities, this year it will be on the South Lawn – as always – on Monday, April 25, with the advertised theme of “Get Up and Go!” emphasizing health and wellness, and will be a premier event in the First Lady’s Let’s Move! initiative to fight childhood obesity. Presumably, chocolate rabbits and Cadbury eggs will not be featured – and maybe not much about cholesterol-laden, hard-boiled eggs, either – so I think I’ll pass on it this year. Nothing against wellness and fighting obesity, but Easter should involve some fun; and iconic chocolate bunnies and eggs should be considered “soul food.”
Which I’ll use as my “segue” to loop back to spiritual preparations for the Easter soon upon us….and which have included, since early Christianity many centuries ago, the big emphasis on penance. I feel strongly that penance is much less known and practiced for most people in places like America and the United Kingdom today than at least some other kinds of Easter preparation. Now it’s still one of the “Big Seven” sacraments (sacred acts and institutions) in a lot of Christian traditions and groups – Orthodox, Anglican, and, of course, Roman Catholic – and it still means something important to especially devout believers….but in United States society at large, Easter preparations are not apt even to think about “penance.” And I’m quite sure it isn’t “as big” for a lot of Roman Catholic or Episcopal folks as it was for so many centuries.
But I’m going to conclude this blog about spiritual journey and preparations during Lent by “resurrecting,” if you will, some understanding about penance. It’s too important to the Christian faith and tradition, at least, for it to fade away without so much as a whimper. And here’s why: the heart of the Christian gospel or good news, of the Faith itself, has long been identified with the Gospel According to John, chapter 3, verse 16 (yes, the John 3:16 that is ubiquitous at football stadiums and other sporting events): “For God so loved the world, that God gave the only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish, but have eternal life.” And while you may not so believe, thoughtful reader, for Christians who do, there’s simply no reason for God to provide a Savior unless people need to be saved. If, as Christianity has always contended, people need to be saved, it is because sin (in the form of “rebellious” self-separation from love and communion with God) has turned people away from God.
Penance, again, is the act and process of turning back to God in confession (admission of wrong and guilt), repentance (related word, of course, and the actual “turning back,” if you will), desire to be forgiven/saved, contrition (sorrow for sin), absolution (traditionally associated with the pronouncement of forgiveness on the part of a priest, for example, but really just the realization of God’s forgiveness/pardon and release from the perishing consequences otherwise associated with sin)….and penitential acts that express in concrete form that whole experience of penance. (As an aside, the old Latin word poena – the root of “penance” and “penitence” means “punishment;” and traditionally, again, penitential acts were seen as a sort of “punishment” for one’s sin, another aspect of spiritual discipline…and could involve very personal acts like “candle-lighting” and prayer….or in olden times, even very harsh, public displays of humiliation and physical pain.)
Now if all that seems unnecessarily complicated and involved, it is so in part because it is a human – and perhaps even sinfully “human” – compulsion to make it complicated….and often confusing. Simplified, penance is what was stated in the first paragraph of this post. It is a spiritual activity in which a believer confesses to sin that separates the self from God, repents by turning away from that sin and back toward God, desires and accepts divine forgiveness, and expresses that fact of repentance and reconciliation by acts of penance drawing one into closer union with God.
Penance may not be as popular with a great many people this Lenten season leading up to Easter as chocolate bunnies and eggs, but for close to two millenia it has been an important recognition. Christian believers know that humans have broken the essential relationship of love with God and others, that it was necessary for God to repair the breach by sending the Son of God on Earth to be the Savior, and that the gift of salvation has to be accepted by faith and penance.
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The Rev. Dr.'s Musings on Nature, Life & Belief 