First Week in Lent
Who is the great teacher we seek to learn from and imitate?
Are you surprised to see that it is the First Week in Lent? The Lenten fast began last week, but it is only now the first “week” of Lent.
Why should all Christians not share in Christ’s fast? Why should the members not follow the Head? If we receive good from this Head, why should we not endure the bad?
Or do we wish to reject what is disagreeable but take our share of pleasure? If that were the case we would show ourselves unworthy to share the life of the Head. All that He suffered, He suffered for us.
If we are put off by being his collaborators in the work of our own salvation, how will we later show ourselves his coworkers? Surely it is no great thing for one who is to sit with Christ at the Father’s table to fast with him, no great thing if a member suffer with the Head with whom he will be glorified!
Happy is the member who clings to this Head through everything, and follows him wherever he goes!
-St. Bernard of Clairvaux, On the Principle of Fasting, Based on the Lord’s Words, “Anoint your head and wash your face.” 1
To Fast With Christ
St. Bernard gives a sort of amusing but helpful image in his Lenten sermon on fasting. He speaks of Christ as the head of the body of the Church, but he uses subtle images of the parts of the body choosing to flee or follow with the head.
It is a profound thought. If we are claiming to share in Christ’s own body through Baptism and the Christian life, we cannot choose any other life than the one chosen by the head. The arms and the feet cannot just dismember themselves and opt out of bodily participation. We remain together, we work together, in accordance with the directions from the head. We cannot be disobedient and flailing members.
There are so many lenses we can use to examine why we fast, especially the lens of cultivating the virtue of temperance. But we also like to reason our way around it sometimes or to diminish our penances. There are, of course, excellent reasons for everything, and we can find those answers if we wish.
Still, sometimes its helpful to remember whose perfect fasting we are participating in, other than over-rationalizing what we are doing or why. Who is the great teacher we seek to learn from and imitate?
At times we have to trust that God will open the eyes of our hearts to his Divine wisdom when we are ready. We may have to humbly accept that we don’t yet know what we need to learn. We can become quite blind to our mediocrities and vices, especially in relation to earthly desires.
St. Thomas Aquinas says that the virtue of temperance has to do with choosing when to withdrawal oneself from pleasure and its seductions. Fasting is one method by which we learn this temperance. But since certain pleasures like food and drink are indeed good for us and necessary, it can be hard to know what the proper limits should be. Fasting helps us to gain clarity about this, to learn to redirect ourselves and always be attentive to the way we allow our senses to lead us away from God.2
If we feel lukewarm towards uniting ourselves to Christ in fasting, let us simply commit to following Him regardless. He has gone to the desert for these forty days, and if He is the head of our ecclesial body, we must remain with Him. He will show us in due time the good towards which this body is being directed.
We know His plans are nothing but the grandest and most perfect that a soul could hope for. As the old hymn goes, “Teach us with you to mourn our sins // And close by you to stay.”
Hymns about Fasting
Lord, who throughout these forty days,
For us did fast and pray,
Teach us with you to mourn our sins,
And close by you to stay.As you with Satan did contend,
And did the vict'ry win,
O give us strength in you to fight,
In you to conquer sin.As you did hunger bear and thirst,
So teach us, gracious Lord,
To die to self, and always live
By your most holy word.
There are so many meditative hymns on this aspect of fasting with Christ. This version of Lord Who Throughout These Forty Days is a perfect piece to add to a Lenten playlist.
Saints and Feasts this Week
If you are someone who enjoys Church history, this is an excellent week of saints and feasts for you. It is easy to be overwhelmed by the vastness of our Catholic heritage, so here are a few starting points to deepen your appreciation of some wonderful people (and things!) the Church will celebrate this week.
St. Peter Damian
First there is Doctor of the Church, Peter Damian. He may seem lesser known today, but if we place him among similar saints of the 11th and 12th centuries, we’ll have a clearer picture.
You’ve likely heard of St. Anselm of Canterbury, St. Bernard of Clairvaux, and, possibly, St. Hildegard of Bingen. They are all worth mentioning with St. Peter Damian because they were all Benedictine monks and reformers of their age. One sign of the great work of ecclesial reformation is the copious amounts of letters that were left by each of them. Reformers like to write letters. They also ought to be mentioned together because they are they four doctors of the Church from the 11th and 12th century and lived in Europe.
They all come to us in the height of the Benedictine monastic life before the rise of the mendicant orders. The Church Doctors who lived from the 13th and 14th centuries were all Dominican and Franciscan saints: Anthony of Padua, Bonaventure, Thomas Aquinas, Albert the Great, and Catherine of Siena.
Peter Damian followed the rule of St. Benedict and even lived as a hermit for some years. He wrote important works demanding change from priests and bishops in their many scandals and abuses, like we have known in recent years. He also wrote about the trinity and the divine power of God. So, there you have it!
He is a wonderful saint to learn about and learn from, and now you know a few places to begin.
The Chair of St. Peter
Next we have a chair. Well, St. Peter’s chair. Does that make it any less odd?
There could be a whole book’s worth of exploration around the history of this feast, but we’ll share some wonderful liturgical images:
In the baptistry at St. Peter’s in Rome, there was a chair the pope would use during the liturgy for confirming the baptized. This chair would be brought into the apse of the main Church for liturgical use on one single day, the feast of the Chair of St. Peter.
“That day the pope did not use the marble cathedra at the back of the apse but sat on this movable cathedra, which was, consequently, made of wood. The importance of this feast was heightened by the fact that 22 February was considered the anniversary of the day when Peter bore witness, by the Sea of Tiberias, to the Divinity of Christ and was again appointed by Christ to be the Rock of His Church.”3
The second significance of this day is that there was a belief that it was the day of Peter’s “election” by Christ as pope.
This celebration is not only about the physical chair of Peter, but what it signifies in our long history of the papacy, one way in which Christ’s promise to remain with us always is still felt today.
Like St. Peter Damian, this is another lesser known celebration that’s well worth embracing with renewed ardor.
St. Polycarp
And now, of course, for the strangely-named St. Polycarp! Have you ever met a Polycarp? We possess a great treasure to have a saint from this early in the life of the Church, as we believe he lived from about 69-155 AD, and was martyred for Christ.
Have you ever wondered when the church first defined what a martyr is?
We are told that he was a disciple of St. John the Evangelist through his disciples Irenaeus of Lyon and Eusebius of Caeseria, and they relate his being sent by the apostles to Asia. Thus, he was Bishop of Smyrna.
In an ancient work called The Matyrdom of Polycarp, we are not only told of how Polycarp died for Christ Jesus, but also we see “the first work in which a martyr is defined as one who dies for the faith.”4
But we’ll leave it to you to read about how this holy man came to die for Christ!
“The Martyrdom of Polycarp is the earliest existing account of the capture and death of an early Christian Martyr after St. Stephen. It is an exceptional valuable document since Polycarp is one of the most eminent figures of the 2nd century Church. The letter provides evidence for the honor given to the martyrs and their relics as well as the practice of celebrating the Eucharist at the martyrs grave each year on the anniversary of their martyrdom. This, by the way, is the origin of the many Saints days in the Catholic liturgical calendar.”
February 21 — St. Peter Damian
The 35 Doctors of the Church — Christopher Rengers, OFM Cap.
Doctors of the Church — Pope Benedict XVI
February 22 — The Chair of St. Peter
February 23 — St. Polycarp
Inspiration for the Week
Stations of the Cross - St Alphonsus Liguori
Uniting Suffering to the Cross - Prayer of Venerable Pauline Marie Jaricot
40 Days at the Foot of the Cross: A Gaze of Love from the Heart of Our Blessed Mother
Why Fast? a homily recording by Fr. James Hudgins of St. Theresa Parish in Ashburn, VA
Forty days and forty nights he spent fasting, and at the end of them was hungry.
Matthew 4:2, Knox Bible
Emphases and passage division is our own
The “treatise” on temperance as a virtue, its parts, and corresponding virtues and vices begins in the Secunda Secundae of the Summa Theologiae at Question 141 (ST II-II, 141)