Transforming a lifestyle into a lovestyle by the transforming power of the cross of Christ
A Lenten Reflection for the 3rd Sunday of Lent
By Fr. Maximilian Buonocore, OSB
Introducing the Penitential Rite
I searched the internet for a good Lenten diet. I found the perfect Lenten diet: It's a five-course meal: (1) Eat your words, (2) Swallow your pride, (3) Digest God’s Holy Word, and, (4) For dessert, indulge your appetite for prayer and meditation. (5) This Lenten meal is always begun with the holy appetizer of repentance of heart. What a menu for Lent! This daily meal is only be completed worthily by engaging in loving service. Let us begin our five-course Lenten meal today with the holy appetizer of repentance of heart, ruminating on our sins and confessing them to the Lord.
Manifestations or interruptions?
One of the world’s most popular comic strips is Hagar the Horrible. In one strip we find Hagar kneeling in prayer. “It’s not easy to believe in you, God. We never see you. How come you never show yourself? How do we know you even exist. . .” Then in the next few frames we see a flower springing into life beside Hagar, a volcano erupting in the distance, an eclipse of the sun turning the sky black, a star shooting across the stratosphere; a tidal wave rushing over Hagar, lightning flashing, a bush burning and not being consumed, and finally, a stone rolling away from the entrance to a tomb. In the last frame Hagar is pulling himself from the mud, dripping wet, surrounded by darkness, saying. “OK, OK. I give up! Every time I bring up this subject, all we get is interruptions.” Perhaps this is why we, too, miss opportunities for encounter with the Lord. The things that we often consider as interruptions of our encounter with Christ are actually the very occasions of encounter. By considering them interruptions, we miss the encounter. One of the images in that cartoon was the image of a bush burning without being consumed: a reference to the burning bush from which the Lord communicated with Moses. It made me realize that God is frequently, throughout every day, making his presence felt, giving me opportunities of encounter with him, communicating with me from a burning bush: the bush of every fellow human being that I come in contact with. Each human being is a burning bush, burning with the flame of the image and likeness of God in them, burning but not consuming. It made me realize that I am standing on holy ground whenever I encounter a fellow human being, especially when I encounter a fellow human being in need. That person is a burning bush through which God is communicating his love to me and commissioning me to convey that love to others, to deliver others from their consuming sufferings. So many people, though the flame of the Spirit of love burns within them without consuming, yet they are being consumed by the combustive energy of sin. I am called to help to deliver God’s people from this enslaving and consuming force. Through the burning bush of my neighbor, God is challenging me to lead his people through the red sea of suffering into a land of the milk and honey of grace and charity.
The last time I talked to a Bush
President George Bush was speaking at a rally. As he was speaking he saw someone in the crowd who looked just like Moses. When the rally was over, he didn’t want to miss the opportunity to meet such a well-known biblical celebrity. So he quickly made his way over to the man and said, “Are you Moses?" He didn’t say anything and just walked away. Bush then told his security agents to go over to interrogate the man. His lead security agent went over to the man and said, "With the beard, the cloak, the staff, the wrinkled skin... you look exactly like Moses." Moses replied, "That is because I am Moses." Confused, the security agent asked, "Why didn't you just tell the President that then? What harm could it have caused?" “Well,” replied Moses, "The last time I talked to a Bush, I was stranded in a desert for 40 years." God asked Moses to lead his people into the wilderness where they sojourned for 40 years because it was in the desert where the Lord was able to transform the Israelites lifestyle - the lifestyle that they learned during their 400 years in Egypt - from a lifestyle into a lovestyle. That is what the 40 years in the wilderness was about - a transformation of a lifestyle into a lovestyle. The Lord said to Moses, “I have witnessed the affliction of my people in Egypt and have heard their cry of complaint against their slave drivers, so I know well what they are suffering.” This is a message of love - the love of a Father for his children - the love that feels the suffering of the beloved. Yet his beloved children were not responding to that love. Their lifestyle prevented them from responding to love with love. He needed to transform their lifestyle into a lovestyle. That is the purpose of our 40 days of Lent, commissioned by God from the burning bush of our humanity, to allow the Lord to transform our lifestyle into a lovestyle.
A Lifestyle is what you pay for. A life is what pays you.
Recently, I got the following fortune in a fortune cookie: “A lifestyle is what you pay for; a life is what pays you.” It got me thinking about the difference between lifestyle and life. A lifestyle is the sum total of all of the work, recreational, social and religious activities that one engages in daily. It includes the use of many things that are paid for to acquire or to engage in, including education and training, transportation, all kinds of devices, utilities, rent and mortgage payments for facilities, etc. But life is not paid for. Life is a gift. This makes me think of an episode with my students. One day two of my students were having an argument. After yelling at each other for a while, one of them said to the other, “Get a life!” The other responded, “Can you get me a gift card for that.” “I don’t know,” said the first, “is it expensive?” A lifestyle can be expensive, but when we live life according to the highest level of our calling as human beings, we will not be paying: life will be paying us from the hidden store deep within us - the store which flows from the image and likeness of God in us; the store of the Spirit of love that dwells in us. This flow of love - this gratuitous divine-life-payment - may, in fact, result expenditure of economic and human resources on our part, but the expenditure will be more directed to community building and support of the life the community to which I belong, and less directed to self-building and support of my own life primarily. Our lifestyle is transformed into a love-style. What we will be expending will be expended more from self-sacrifice in the service of love, rather than in the service of self-advancement and self-interest. That is what Lent, and the perpetually Lenten life of the Christian, is all about: through prayer, abstinence, and self-sacrificial service, constant decreasing of my investment in lifestyle, while constantly increasing my investment in life - that is, the constant increasing of my freedom from the self-centered demands of lifestyle in order for God to be ever increasingly able to invest true life - that is, divine life - in me, and, through me, to invest his divine life - his divine love - in the world. Lent is about God paying us - making a personal investment in us - and the Lenten exercises clear our accounts payable of worldly expenses and make our accounts receivable ever more to his divine payments of grace and of love. And this all happens by the transforming power of the Cross of Christ encountered in and through the burning bush of my fellow suffering human beings.
