Sacrificing in Solidarity

Lent is a great time for Catholics to wear their faith on their sleeves.

Ash Wednesday - which, surprisingly to some, is not a holy day of obligation - allows us the chance to wear the ashes, a sign of repentance and our beginning and end in God, as a badge of honor that celebrates our faith outwardly and visibly to those who see us. My friend tells a great story about life at Notre Dame and the social pressure of having ashes - long story, short, we recycle the line of a student who has to defend themself since it's mid-afternoon and they don't have ashes yet: "I'm going later!" Basically, you better have ashes on your forehead if you think you're a Catholic.

And from Ash Wednesday on - especially during the first week, when resolve and boldness are high - we love to talk about what we're giving up. The conversation trends almost toward being a late-winter New Year's Resolution at times, but it's at least a chance to come up with a change you can make in your life. I mean, ideally, we keep the sacrifice of Christ at the heart of our own sacrifices - it's meant to be a struggle throughout the Lenten season that helps us be in solidarity with Christ who became man and suffered on His way to the ultimate sacrifice.

That's the ideal; it's tough. The absolute expectation is that you back up the early-Lent talk and turn it into more than just the thing you say in order to be included in the conversation. It's that you see it through to Easter and in some way realize a fresh taste of the thing you sacrificed on the great day of victory. Another ideal - you let the lesson of that sacrifice take root in your post-Lent-life.

What's the point of this all, idealized or not? We have a faith that supplies us a baseline, a steady cycle to frame our days and years. Our lives of faith as baptized Christians in the Catholic Church have inherent rhythm. Sometimes the institutionalism and tradition of our Church is the object of great scorn and criticism, but I embrace it as a crucial part of what makes me Catholic. And the primacy and prevalence of Lent and its practices are a beautiful opportunity that we have every year without having to do anything conscious or adjust our schedules - just like the glory of three-day weekends for Columbus Day or Presidents' Day that get you a day away from school and a shortened week to come back to, Lent pops up each year, as winter turns to spring, to invite us to repentance.

At tons of points during our years, throughout our lives, we have a moment, make a mistake, have an epiphany, make a vow - we want to affect some kind of change and adjust something in our lives. But whether it pops up during some random days or at the cusp of a new year, these things often don't stick. Luckily, our faith tradition gives us the blessing of this season of repentance, a time when we can tap into the extra something - the transcendence - of our faith to provide the motivation that is missing in New Years' Resolutions and other unsuccessful vows.

We can have this movement in our hearts toward the opportunity of Lent, to put a concrete promise toward our faithful repentance and seize on this opportunity that our tradition gives us. But it's not just Tradition: it's our community, our Church.

Social pressure - and I don't mean the "everyone's jumping off the cliff" peer pressure - is a healthy and purely interpersonal way to encourage behavior. It's knowing that other friends have dropped pop or coffee for Lent and that you're not alone in your potentially bold struggle; it's knowing that you promised your two friends that you'd keep to a jogging regimen together, so you can't leave them hanging.

The solidarity with Christ in a Lenten sacrifice, or even in the taking on of a new practice, is solidarity with Him in His being driven to the desert and His passion, and it's also solidarity with all His people. We enter this season banding with one another in a spirit of penitence, joining our sacrifices together in the Eucharistic life we live as the Church. Our verbalized sharing of sacrifices gives a clue into just how we bring our struggles and challenges and sacrifices together in the Eucharist. We have so much in common if we only talk to each other and pray together a little. We can deepen the bonds within our Church by developing relationships that are open and welcoming to faith-sharing. That starts in the family and grows outward into our adult faith lives and their friendships.

Most importantly, we can realize this in an less directly-conversational yet transcendent way through our being taken, blessed, broken, and shared in the Eucharist. This is why we must keep the Mass at the center of our faith lives. The sharing of our Lenten sacrifices can start from a desire to belong and be involved in the conversations, but it takes deeper and more profound lasting roots in ourselves if we tie it to a dedicated Eucharistic life. We can build on the foundations of interconnectedness and shared pilgrimage by joining in the mystical Body of Christ, that community to which Christ has called us all, to pray together, around the Word and Sacrament, and go forth as His hands and feet.