Lent: An Invitation to a Deeper Experience of Merciful Love, and an Opportunity to Share It

Article by Fr. Emmanuel Nnadozie, OCD

The Holy Season of Lent is offered to us as a spring time of God’s grace and as a season to renew ourselves in the experience of God’s merciful love – given in the form of prevenient grace and in the form of pardon and forgiveness. It is a time to experience and receive God’s compassion and merciful love, and a season to share this love with others. It is eminently a time to prepare ourselves for the celebration of the solemn feast of the Lord’s resurrection – the feast of Easter.

In the Season of Lent, the Sacred Liturgy puts before us certain important spiritual themes for our meditation: temptation and trials, failure and grace, repentance and conversion, fasting and discipline, penance and prayer, almsgiving; mercy and compassion, renewal, adoption, and re-generation. But the greatest of these themes presented to us is perhaps the theme of the merciful love of our Heavenly Father, which encompasses the Paschal Mystery of Christ, (the themes of pain and suffering, and the passion, death, and the Resurrection of Christ) with which we conclude the Holy Season of Lent. It is a theme that ties all the other themes together as sub-plots in the one big design of our redemption and salvation in Christ.

WHAT IS MERCIFUL LOVE?

First, Merciful Love is not a thing—He is a Person! Merciful Love is the great love that God, our Heavenly Father, bears us. Secondly, to fully understand God’s merciful love, we need to under-stand our relationship to Him as our Father. Lent offers us the opportunity to delve more deeply and intimately into the mystery of the Fatherhood of God, and our own filial adoption. We are not just admirers of a distant but generous God. We are not slave-worshippers of a just and unrelenting God; we are called to be the sons and daughters of a merciful Father, who has loved us so much with such tender love as to be willing to pay the ultimate price for our redemption through the death of His Son, so that we would have new life in Christ. Familiar images and symbols convey to us the richness embedded in this concept of merciful love.

IMAGES OF THE GOD AS MERCIFUL FATHER

Ash Wednesday calls us to an awareness of the presence of our Heavenly Father in all we do. The Lenten liturgy reminds us that we have a Heavenly Father who is not only aware of what is going on in our lives (including our prayers, penance, and almsgiving), but he is really interested in our lives and cares for us even when we rebel against him, as in the Gospel of the 4th Sunday of Lent. The whole point in the story of the Prodigal Son is the large-heartedness of the Father.

He shows mercy and compassion when we have repented of our sins and failures (the theme of repentance and conversion), and even declares a feast when we come back to him (the theme of grace).

The image we get from the story of the Prodigal Son is not one of what is happening between strangers. It is the image of a family relationship: of what is happening between father and son. Here, we get a picture of the father accepting back his repentant son (the theme of re-adoption and regeneration). It is an image filled with intimacy, tenderness, compassion, nurturing and fathering!

These images relate to the characteristic good qualities of a parent. God, like a good parent, is committed to caring for us, no matter what it takes, only that he is even more tender in his care than the most tender of mothers! “Can a mother forget the baby at her breast and have no com-passion on the child she has borne? Though she may forget, I will not forget you!” (Is. 49:15). In this passage, Yahweh God assures his people of His constant, unchangeable, and tender remembrance, and care of them. The passage is made even more eloquent in speaking about the unsurpassable love of God for his people when it shows that although earthly parents may at times be unmindful of their children, God’s “eyes” and “heart” are constantly watching over his people. In fact, they are carved in the very palms of his hands! (cf. Is. 49:16). Our sense of being adults, at times, prevents us from fully realizing, and whole-heartedly entering this parent-child relation-ship with God.

ST. THÉRÈSE ILLUSTRATES GOD’S FATHERHOOD

St. Thérèse’s understanding of God shows an appreciation of Him as a Father, who has a heart full of love, mercy, and compassion.

“Let us suppose that the son of a very clever doctor, stumbling over a stone on the road, falls and breaks his leg. His father hastens to him, lifts him lovingly, and binds up the fractured limb, putting forth all his skill. The son, when cured, displays the utmost gratitude, and he has excel-lent reason for doing so.”

In this illustration given by Thérèse, we have a case of a post factum merciful love and care of the father who after the son had been wounded comes lovingly with a remedy. The father’s com-passion is discovered after the fall had taken place. It comes from behind the event of the collapse. Thérèse also talks about God’s mercy from an a priori perspective—a merciful love experienced in advance of any actual fall or brokenness.

“But let us take another supposition. The father, aware that a dangerous stone lies in his son's path, is before-hand with the danger and removes it, unseen by anyone. The son, thus tenderly cared for, not knowing of the mishap from which his father's hand has saved him, naturally will not show him any gratitude, and will love him less than if he had cured him of a grievous wound. But suppose he heard the whole truth, would he not in that case love him still more? Well now, I am this child, the object of the foreseeing love of a Father ‘Who did not send His son to call the just, but sinners.’ He wishes me to love Him, because He has forgiven me, not much, but every-thing. Without waiting for me to love Him much, as St. Mary Magdalen did, He has made me understand how He has loved me with an ineffable love and forethought, so that now my love may know no bounds” (Story of a Soul, Chap IV).

God precedes her and with a foreseeing merciful love that takes care of everything beforehand. “Your love has gone before me since I was a child. It has grown with my growth,” she declares.

JESUS IS THE LIFE-IMAGE OF THE MERCIFUL FATHER

In the Book of Deuteronomy, God’s posture towards his people is represented by the image of a protective mother, symbolized by the mother eagle: “As an eagle that stirs up her nest, and flutters over her young, he spread abroad his wings, he took them, and he bore them on his feathers.”

In the New Testament, this mother-bird imagery is resumed. Here it is Jesus himself who summarizes his care for Jerusalem in the metaphor of a mother hen who lovingly gathers her chicks un-der her wings in the moments of peril: “Jerusalem, Jerusalem...how often I have longed to gather your children together, as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings” (Matthew 23:37). Jesus reflects the same kind of tender loving care that Yahweh has for his people.

All of Jesus’ words and actions and His very Person, reflect the Heavenly Father’s love. All about him are oriented toward this goal: to show us the Father’s Face and bring us to know the Father and love Him from his (Jesus’) way of being Son—totally Son— and entrust ourselves to the Heavenly Father. Jesus is the Light that has come into this world to reveal to us the Face of the Father, and that is why he says: “He who has seen Me has seen My Father, because I am in My Father and My Father is in me!” And this is why also Jesus referred to His Father with that most tender and familiar expression which Hebrew children, in their earliest years, use to call their fathers: “Abba!” This is how He taught us to call His Father when we pray.

LENT IS A TIME TO APPRECIATE OUR FATHER-CHILD RELATIONSHIP WITH GOD

Jesus models for us what it means to be sons and daughters of a Merciful Compassionate Father. There is no doubt that he knew the Father’s great love and approval of him: “Then from the cloud came a voice (from heaven) that said: ‘This is my chosen Son, listen to him.’ It demands more than a feeling for our failures.

It asks us to enter more deeply into the profundity of this relationship, and like the Prodigal Son, there to rediscover the merciful love of the Father; and thus, come to the renewal of our filial relationship with God as He restores us to the dignity of his authentic sons and daughters (the theme of renewal and regeneration).

The Prodigal Son came back a long way off—The Father ran out to meet him He came back in shame and depression—The Father met him with compassion and kisses

He came back unworthy to be called son—The Father restored him with dignity The Prodigal Son came back in rags—He was restored with the finest robes

He came back barefooted—He was adorned with the best sandals He came disenfranchised—the Father gave him the ring of royalty and belonging He came back hungry—the Father declared a feast, killing the fattened calf He came back as though mourning—the Father declared a celebration with music and rejoicing He came back disgraced—The Father gave him back his honor Above all, he came back a slave, like any in his Father’s House—The Father restored his sonship!

In a way, the Prodigal Son killed his Father, by asking for what can only be given after his Father’s death—his share of the Father’s estate. In a sense, it took the symbolic death of the Father (his departure from the Father) to come to the realization that he would only starve to death out-side of the Father’s House. When we return to an intimate relationship with the Father—and back into his dwelling place, we come to a realization of God’s grace. Lent is a time not just to re-member that Jesus died for us; it is eminently a time to return to the Father’s House and to the Father’s embrace of love because of that death.

IN GOD’S MERCIFUL LOVE IS ALL GRACE

Now, concerning the actual moments of failures, Thérèse’s insight shows that the Father’s merciful love still overshadows any faults that we may commit, provided we are repentant. Here is what she writes in a letter to a priest who was despondent about his own struggles:

“I picture a father who has two children, mischievous and disobedient, and when he comes to punish them, he sees one of them who trembles and gets away from him in terror, having, however, in the bottom of his heart the feeling that he deserves to be punished; and his brother, on the contrary, throws himself into his father's arms, saying that he is sorry for having caused him any trouble, that he loves him, and to prove it he will be good from now on, and if this child asks his father to punish him with a kiss, I do not believe that the heart of the happy father could resist the filial confidence of his child, whose sincerity and love he knows. He realizes, however, that more than once his son will fall into the same faults, but he is prepared to pardon him always, if his son always takes him by his heart... I say nothing to you about the first child, dear little Brother, you must know whether his father can love him as much and treat him with the same indulgence as the other” (LT 258: To Fr. Belliere, July 18, 1897).

The love revealed to St. Thérèse in the Person of our Lord was a merciful love, and it is as "Merciful Love" that she always speaks of it. In God’s merciful love “all is grace.”

During this season of Lent, we would have opportunity to exercise ourselves in charity. Let us not let them pass us by. May we truly strive to become in word and deed, in this Holy Season, like our Heavenly Father!