Penance that Outlasts the Emotion
By Thomas S. Heard, PhD, ’16
With Lent approaching, many thoughts and emotions are summoned as Ash Wednesday arrives, sending us into forty days of prayerful reflection. “What will I do with this Lent?” “What will I give up and why?” “How can I better serve the Lord?” While these are significant questions, the self-generated answers are sometimes trivial or inconsequential, beneficial neither to the body of Christ nor the Christian’s growth as a disciple. A sermon by the Tractarian writer, John Henry Newman (1801-1890), caught my eye one evening as I was reading one of his collections. From Psalm 27, Newman wrote on the concluding verse: “O tarry thought the Lord’s leisure: be strong, and He shall comfort thine heart; and put thou thy trust in the Lord.” A contemporary translation finds: “Wait for the Lord, be strong and let your heart take courage; wait for the Lord.” Waiting is a challenge for Christians who internally feel moved and called “to do something” during Lent; however, the “what to do” is not yet fully defined. To such persons who are of “sincere and earnest mind,” wrote Newman, this “impatience and restlessness” may bring danger to the Christian who knows not what to do because “he is restless, because he is ignorant. . . .” From this, the self guides rather than God.
Some impatient Christians put themselves on a new line of action or adopt some particular rule of life, even refusing to have their self-imposed “indelible” sins of the past blotted out until Christ pronounces them “acquitted and blessed,” intending to nurse their self-indignation till their death. Their desire is strong, looking for something to do as personal indignation rails, placing them against the work accomplished by Jesus Christ through his obedience. We guard against excess and the ambitious attempts that result in a grand experiment; when a self-appointed rule sets one up for failure, the burden becomes too great to bear. In combination with their ambitious attempts, the result is a grand experiment that can bring sorrow when failure to bear one’s own self-appointed rule is recognized. “All things are done by degrees; all things (through God’s grace) may come in time, but not at once.” Rightly asserted, Newman says, “as well might a child think to grow suddenly like St. Paul the aged.”
The blindness of what can be undertaken is complicated by misunderstanding that the “most appropriate of burdens is what is lasting, what is continual.” “A slight penance,” Newman says, “if long, is far more trying than a severe one, if short. This stands to reason; for it outlasts their present agitated state of mind . . . and reminds them of what they afterwards will be likely to forget.” Much of the danger to the Christian comes from one acting on one’s own, “in the first fervor of penitence,” as their own and private judgment goes without advice and guidance. Let us seek not to be our own physicians, but seek the wise counsel of one who may direct our Lenten devotions and piety in a meaningful way, one likely to succeed and to truly embrace the grand accomplishment of the cross of Christ.
The goal is relationship with the Savior found during the Lenten season: forty days of praying in relationship with the Savior.
Trained in chemistry and biochemistry, having earned a Master’s Degree and Doctorate respectively, Tom Heard received a call to seminary and arrived at Nashotah House in 2011. After a time in a successful postdoctoral position at Merck & Company, Dr. Heard was awarded an IRTA Fellowship at the National Institutes of Health, where he pursued a career in intellectual property. At this time, he also began to sense a deepening call to discipleship and became a fellow at the C.S. Lewis Institute in Washington D.C. He has studied apologetics in the U.S., Oxford, and Cambridge, as well as with the European Leadership Forum.