Race Prepping

Septuagesima

2010 Lansing Catholic Soccer Team

    In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.  Amen.  In my first assignment as a priest in East Lansing, I also worked closely with Lansing Catholic High School.  And, having formerly played soccer, I was fairly active with the boys’ soccer team.  Jokingly, one of the athletes, Joey, challenged me to a race, and I eventually accepted at the end of a later school day.  Students came out to the soccer field to watch me race Joey.  I think we even had the athletic director tell us when to start.  
    When we started, I was surprised at Joey’s speed, a speed he didn’t show that often on the soccer field.  But I tried to keep it close, hoping that I could pull ahead.  At about three-quarters of the field, Joey still had a small lead, but I felt funny, and my legs were feeling like jello.  Before I knew it I had fallen flat on my face, and Joey had won the race.  I was taken aback a bit, and it occurred to me just how out of shape I was, even at the young age of 27 or so.  It turns out 27 is different than 18, and when you don’t really do physical exercise, and you have a few adult beverages the night before, and don’t eat so well or hydrate the next morning, you can’t just race a seventeen-year-old and expect to win.  
    St. Paul in the epistle today talks about training, something I did not do in my race with Joey.  He talks about training bodies to win a race, but more importantly, training our souls to win an incorruptible crown, the ancient sign of victory.  And as we enter the -gesima Sundays–Septuagesima today, Sexagesima next Sunday, and Quinquagesima the Sunday after that–we are training ourselves for Lent, the time of great asceticism and self-denial.  Because sometimes, if we wait until the last minute and then decide to do these difficult penances, we may fall flat on our faces, hopefully not literally like I did, but spiritually.  
    Today, then, is a good day to start thinking about what you want to give up for Lent, and perhaps what extra prayers or works of charity you could add to your routine.  Do you have time in your schedule for daily Mass?  Or how about joining us for Stations of the Cross on Fridays after the 12:10 p.m. Mass?  Or maybe simply making the first Saturday Masses more regularly.  
    How about restraining the body from what it desires?  Do you give up meat every Friday?  Is fasting a regular part of your life?  Or maybe start pulling back on how often you’re on your phone for social media or games, and use that extra time for prayer, or for more time with your family.  No matter what  we are going to do, we should probably start training for it or at least thinking about it now, so that it doesn’t hit us all at once, and we then fail because we were not prepared.
    We should also not feel bad or despair if we haven’t had the strongest Lent before.  I know that sometimes we can defeat ourselves before we even get started by bemoaning the fact either that we have tried something hard and have not yet succeeded, or perhaps that we have not really tried anything difficult at all.  We may be like those who were standing around, even towards the end of the day.  But if we give our all, even for a small amount of time, the Lord promises in the Gospel today that we will receive a full wage; not because we deserve it, but due to His generosity.  
    And the payment that we receive has much more value than money.  What we receive by disciplining our bodies and restraining our desires is a fuller correspondence to the life of Christ.  Each time we say no when our will wants us to say yes, we are utilizing God’s grace for the proper ordering of ourselves, as happened in the Garden of Eden before the Fall: our bodies and minds were subject to our soul, which was subject to God.  And that was how Christ lived perfectly.  So the more that we allow God’s grace to configure us to Christ, the more we will be prepared for heaven.  And the more that we are prepared for heaven, the more likely it will be that we will inherit that great bequest of beatitude, or inherit it more quickly and have less time in Purgatory.
    But it’s also important to remember that our discipline does not earn us heaven.  It is easy to become like the servants hired at the beginning of the day, and feel like we have “earned” heaven because we have been working hard to follow Christ, and Christ owes us eternal happiness.  Christ owes us nothing.  Everything is a gift.  The ability to respond to God’s grace is itself a grace, and we cannot claim it as our own.  However, when we seek to respond to God’s grace, when we seek to conform our wills to Christ, He deigns to give us rewards as if we had earned it, but always doing so out of His Divine beneficence.  
    So, over these next few weeks before Lent begins on 14 February, start thinking about what you think God would encourage you do to for a Lenten discipline.  Prepare yourselves to enter the desert of Lent.  Don’t just show up and expect to succeed.  Seek God’s grace to mortify the flesh, so that you maybe be transformed by God’s grace to be more like Christ, who with the Father and the Holy Spirit, lives and reigns for ever and ever.