Regaining an Integral Vision
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Homily for the 1st Sunday of Lent
By Rev. Patrick J. Fiorillo
As we are now fully into the “Season of 40 Days,” or Quadragesima as it is known in Latin, it is interesting to note the significance of the number 40 both in culture and in the Bible. There is the 40-hour work week; pregnancy on average lasts about 40 weeks; during the Bubonic Plague ships would be isolated in the harbor for 40 days before passengers could go ashore (this is where the word quarantine comes from); there are 40
spaces on a Monopoly board; 40 players on a Major League Baseball Team; the Top 40 of pop music; and some say “life begins at 40.” In the Bible the Great Flood lasted 40 days; Moses spent 40 days on Mount Sinai; the Israelites wandered 40 years in the desert; the Prophet Elijah spent 40 days walking toward Horeb, the mountain of God; and now Jesus spends 40 days in the desert, in preparing for his public ministry.
What do these all have in common? They are times of testing and transformation. The desert represents disconnecting from the superficial and being alone with God. It can be quite difficult to be by oneself for an extended period. But if we can embrace some silence and solitude this Lent – even if just for an hour here or there – that time alone with God can start to break down the barriers in our soul that prevent us from seeing the deeper, hidden realities of life.
Years before becoming Pope, Cardinal Ratzinger noted: “Our world is so full of what immediately impinges on our senses that we are in danger of seeing only the parts and losing sight of the whole. It takes self-control to see beyond what is right in front of us and free ourselves from the tyranny of superficiality.”[1] I love the phrase “tyranny of superficiality;” it’s amazing the think that he said that decades before smartphones and social media. The point being, our souls yearn for these 40 days in the desert to recover an integral vision of ourselves, of the world, and of God.
The disintegrated vision we suffer now is not just a result of smartphones and social media; it started with the fall of Adam and Eve. That final sentence from the First Reading notes that “the eyes of both of them were opened, and they realized that they were naked.” (Gen 3:7) There are many ways one might interpret this. The famous psychologist Jordan Peterson has had many fascinating things to say about Genesis, analyzing it from a psychological perspective. But since he is not working with Divine Revelation, there is one thing he definitely gets wrong: he says that Adam and Eve’s realization they are naked was the beginning of self-consciousness, and thus humanity as we know it. This cannot be the Catholic understanding though, since it coincides with Original Sin.
The new vision of Adam and Eve seeing each other naked was not a gain or a positive insight; it was a loss; a loss of the integral vision of the human person; a loss of being able to see the whole person, body and soul, without shame. It was a loss of original innocence, of purity of heart.[2] With our disintegrated vision inherited through Original Sin, we now tend toward seeing others not as ends, or subjects of love, but as objects to be used for personal gain or pleasure.[3] In a word, we become as Ratzinger said, fixated on the superficial.
The three temptations Jesus faces in the desert by the devil represent the three most powerful temptations we all face constantly. The temptation for Jesus to sacrifice reliance on God by changing stones into bread is pleasure. The temptation to test God by throwing himself down from the temple is pride. The temptation on the mountaintop to sacrifice faithfulness to God for worldly power and honor is vainglory. We might call them the three “P’s” of all temptation, which characterize our disintegrated world vision: pleasure, pride, and power.
And so this season of Lent offers us a special time to go out into the desert with Jesus and fight back against the devil with the weapons of prayer, fasting, and almsgiving: prayer for mitigating our pride, fasting for disciplining our sense appetite, almsgiving for training ourselves to serve others instead of exerting power over them. This spirituality of Lent is really the pattern for the whole Christian life.
Today, all those participating in Rite of Christian Initiation for Adults programs across the Church will be journeying to their respective cathedrals to participate in the Rite of Election. There they will become officially admitted to participate in the Sacraments of Initiation at the upcoming Easter Vigil. Having been preparing all year, it’s a distinctive ceremony to mark a new stage in their process of conversion. Each subsequent week in Lent there will be other small liturgical rites to mark this heightened sense of anticipation of the Easter Vigil.
These ceremonies during Lent for those in RCIA also serve as a reminder that while these candidates are preparing for formal, outward conversion, those of us already Catholic must take this time of Lent to renew our own interior conversion. As Ratzinger further notes, “The purpose of Lent [for all of us], therefore, is to keep alive the fact that being a Christian can only take the form of becoming a Christian ever anew, that it is not an event now over and done with, but a process requiring constant practice,” continual interior conversion.[4] By prayer, fasting, and almsgiving, we can overcome the constant temptations to pride, pleasure, and power, and thereby recover what was lost at the fall: our integral vision of the world, of man, and of God.
[1] Joseph Ratzinger, Dogma and Preaching: Applying
Christian Doctrine to Daily Life, tran. Michael Miller and Matthew
O’Connell, (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2011), p. 283.
[2] Pope John Paul II, General Audience (14 May 1980), in Man and Woman He Created
Them: A Theology of the Body, trans. Michael Waldstein (Boston: Pauline
Books & Media, 2006), 27, pp. 238-242.
[3] C.f.
Karol Wojtyla, Love and Responsibility, trans.
Grzegorz Ignatik, (Boston: Pauline Books and Media, 2013), Chapter 1, Part I.
[4] Ratzinger, 280.
