Now that we are well into Lent and many of us have already broken or fractured at least one of our Lenten resolutions, it is a legitimate question to ask why we make them in the first place. If you will indulge me for a minute, let me tell you something about my family home. It is no longer in our family now but even to this day I dream about it. I feel good when I think of the years I lived there before entering the Oblates, of my mom’s death there, of my father’s death and one of the saddest days of my life when after having cleaned out as many of the personal items we could, I blessed the house one final time, walked out and locked the back door for the last time.
As much as I love that house, I have often thought that were I to somehow move back there now, the first thing I would do is get larger plumbing leading into the house and throughout the house! The plumbing may have been fine 100 years ago when the house was built but it is clearly inadequate now for daily showers or washing machines. A daily drizzle would be a better definition of the morning “shower.” The problem was not the availability of water but getting it into the house and into the shower.
In Book 2, Chapter 11 of the Treatise on the Love of God, Saint Francis de Sales raises a similar question when he asks why, with the limitless abundance of God’s loving Grace, so little of it at times seems to get to us. He uses this example to explain why. He says the abundance of God’s love is like a great reservoir flowing into our garden but if the canal leading to our garden, the canal that we constructed and we maintain, is small or restricted, then naturally the flow of water will be small.
The little Lenten exercises we undertake like a restriction of food, drink or of TV or internet use, cleaning out excessive clothing from the closet and even the more positive things like praying the Stations of the Cross are all attempts on our part to widen the channels so the abundance of the love of God can flow more freely in us.
So don’t give up even when you seem to break yet another Lenten resolution. The abundance of God’s love, waiting to flow in us, is far greater than the uncomfortableness of cleaning out the blocked plumbing to increase its flow.
Father David Whalen, OSFS
Priest-Assistant, St. Pius X Parish
Toledo, OH
