Lenten Reflections

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By Br. George Rumley, O.S.B., Campus Ministry

Laetare Sunday (from the Latin, “Rejoice!”) is the Church shouting to us tired, boring adults: “be a kid again—yes, even during Lent, and perhaps especially during Lent!”

Such an exhortation might seem more reasonable during Advent when we are surrounded by nostalgic sentimentality, but today’s readings point the way. St. Paul encourages us to live as “children of the light.” Few Gospel characters exemplify this ideal as well as the man born blind in John 9. After Jesus restores his sight, the man spends the rest of the passage proclaiming this miracle with guileless exuberance, a marked contrast to others in the story. The Pharisees, obsessed with finding grounds for condemning Jesus, are blind to the wonder of the miracle and waste themselves on legalistic scheming. Even the man’s parents cannot join in their son’s joy, afraid as they are of their own religious leaders. The healed man is the only one who acts rationally—which is to say, with childlike awe and a no-nonsense recounting of the facts.

This contrast comes to a head with what, for me, has always been one of the Gospel’s laugh-out-loud moments. Frustrated by the Pharisees’ repetitive interrogation, the man retorts with a question of his own: “Do you want to become his disciples, too?” It’s a profound moment. A man who, because of his disability and the presumed sin behind it, is at the lowest rung of his society, not only evades a rhetorical trap but even challenges the elites with a call to conversion. I love to imagine Jesus standing off to the side smiling broadly (even laughing?) at this purity and innocence. Here is a child of the light, heedless of Machiavellian maneuvers and declaring simply what he knows to be true: “I was blind and now I see.”

Can we rejoice as children of the light this Lent? Will we allow Lent to work its wonders by loosening our “adult” attachments to self-interested machinations, fear of giving offense, or maintaining our precious respectability? If we have trouble claiming our spiritual childlikeness, let us open ourselves to the prayer of St. Paul: “Awake, O sleeper, and arise from the dead, and Christ will give you light.”