THE penitential season of Lent begins on Ash Wednesday next week.

I’d like to draw your attention briefly to a certain widespread misconception: Lent is often mistaken for a grim season.

Recalling personal sins for forty days, practicing penance, giving up food and fun, meditating upon the most gruesome death — to the world these are punitive and morbid practices. Daily life presents enough problems without indulging in what appears to be an extended guilt trip. And even if Jesus Christ existed, isn’t his death over already?

These views are commonly held by those who have experienced Lent superficially or have seen it from the outside. The truth about Lent is that, when observed well, it is not only the happiest time of year, but leads to a generally happier life.

That’s because Lent partakes of the happiest philosophy of life that has ever existed. In that world view, true happiness is not found in ephemeral satisfactions, even very noble ones, but in spiritual elevation.

True happiness is not incompatible with suffering — that’s at the heart of the philosophy of Jesus Christ. Happiness consists in possessing meaning — the answers to life’s deepest questions — and pursuing that which is most exalted.

Many people practice Buddhist-style meditation or “mindfulness” today. In these practices, practitioners seek to empty themselves and draw closer to an ambient, all-surrounding, mindless force.

Lenten meditation, by contrast, is the practice of filling oneself.

It consists in putting oneself in the place of God come to earth, hated and tortured by men. The pains experienced by Jesus Christ (described vividly by Dr. Pierre Barbet in his book A Doctor at Calvary), were the most excruciating ever encountered. No one was more sensitive and his sufferings were both mental and physical. In Lenten meditation, the practitioner seeks to unite himself with the mystical depths of Christ’s suffering. Therein he seeks not to glory in suffering, but to feed on supernatural food.

According to Aristotle,

The happiness proper to man dwells in activities according to virtue; and if there be among such activities any pre-eminent one, that will be the special seat of happiness. For happiness is pre-eminent and the crown of all things and our crowning activity is that of the best among our powers . . . that power which, by nature, rules and guides us towards truth and the good. . . .

[Nicomachean Ethics]

Truth and the good.

That’s it, exactly. Lent is about truth and the good. Both comprise the road to happiness. Both are compatible with suffering.

More from Aristotle:

[W]e ought not to follow the advice of those who bid us think only of human interest, as proper to our human life, and of the mortality which all men share. Rather should we, so far as may he conceivable and possible, enter upon immortality and shape our very thought with the aim of living by the standard of the highest principle within us. . . . No man can live a life like this so far as he is merely man, but in so far as there is a divine element in his nature. [emphasis added]

Those who practice Lent as a series of penal exercises meant to secure a ticket to heaven are missing out on its greatest potential, which consists in becoming new on the inside, on becoming  a different person altogether — on becoming happier not just in the next life, but in this one.

Fr. Edward Leen wrote in his book Why the Cross?:

[God’s] object is to furnish men with the means of becoming perfect and not merely with the means of escaping the painful consequence of being imperfect. What the Saviour intended should effect man’s emancipation from sinfulness, man strives to turn into a mere means of emancipation from sin.

God did not give us the true religion so that we could be miserable. He gave it to us so we could also be happy. More from Fr. Leen:

Man can be made happy, not by things, but by life. Mere existence cannot give him beatitude. He becomes happy when existence is transformed into veritable life by being brought into contact with Life itself. Without the Saviour man would exist, but would not live. Hence Jesus states that the purpose of His coming is that man might have life and have it in ever increasing measure. Life expresses itself in appropriate activity.

Jesus Christ experienced extreme mental and physical suffering. But He was still the happiest man who ever walked the earth, possessing always the vision of God. Joining ourselves with his travails is to partake of His happiness. More from Fr. Leen:

The Gospel of Jesus Christ is not a negation of human aspirations. It is the glad tidings that man’s perennial dream of immediate happiness can be realised. Jesus outlines for His hearers the nature of this happiness and tells them that He has the power and the will to lead them to it. He says that He can create the Source of it in the depths of their own souls, if they will but believe in Him and follow His directions. To see God is to be happy. He undertakes to make that vision possible for men, if they consent to tread the path of life He traces for them.

I’m not suggesting that one should forego all the difficult and punishing exercises of Lent, including simple resignation to the difficulties life throws at us, which is one of the best penitential exercises. None of this is pleasurable. I’m not suggesting we should not suffer pangs of remorse and conscience. And I’m not suggesting great sorrow at the commemoration of the Passion is unnecessary. If we are given the gift of tears, so much the better.

But no matter how we feel during these practices, we should always recall that to mortify ourselves and to meditate on these historical events in the right spirit is to obtain incomparable treasures, to place our own sufferings in their proper context and to become happier, much as the earth is renewed by the dreary rains of late winter.

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