When will our journey end? I speak at
the same time of the complaints by the people of Israel to Moses in our first
reading today, from Numbers and, more importantly for us, our journey of Lent.
The people Moses led out of Egypt
suffered often from a kind of bodily and also spiritual weariness. “With their
patience worn out by the journey, the people complained against God and Moses,”
we hear today from the Book of Numbers. The people Moses leads are physically
tired; they are hungry; they are thirsty, and now to bypass Edom Moses takes
the Israelite people across another hot, barren desert. Last summer, I was in
the Negev, the desert south of Israel and Palestine of which Numbers speaks. As
I have experienced, the Negev can be unbearably hot!
And so it is understandable that the
people complain yet again “against God and Moses,” but something more than
bodily need is behind their complaining. “With their patience worn out by the
journey…” I am suggesting that the hunger, thirst, fatigue, and thus impatience
of the people led by Moses are more spiritual than physical.
How many of us, as faithful as we are,
can fall into the same kind of spiritual impatience? I speak among the best
Christians: those of us right here who come to Mass almost daily; those who
experience the Sacraments regularly, especially Reconciliation; those who serve
our parish and our community with deep love and joy; those who pray.
But I think that, spiritually, we can all
have our “patience worn out by [our] journey,” especially during Lent. Occasionally,
I receive messages from friends such as the one I received a few days ago (from
outside our parish): “When can we stop our Lenten sacrifices?”
On the surface, my friend was simply wondering
when Lent ends. The short answer to this question is Holy Thursday. But the
deeper question I ask myself when I am asked such questions (at the risk of
reading too much into the original question) is this: Is my friend; are some of
us finding ourselves spiritually “worn out” by our Lenten journey? If any of us
answer “yes” to my question, do not worry. Some of us may love Lent, and yet to become weary, even spiritually from time to
time, is natural, especially during this spiritually intense season of Lent.
I am not criticizing anyone for
spiritual impatience or fatigue. Instead, I especially keep in my prayers those
who may find Lent and its “sacrifices” trying, and I invite us all as one
Church to support in our prayer the people among us who are spiritually weary.
By praying, and also by engaging in “Lenten”
disciplines that extend beyond Lent‒ freely acting with kindness and
forgiveness toward one another, for example‒ we may find our patience slightly
less “worn out by [our] journey” this Lent. We may find ourselves more joyful
as we move through our upcoming Holy Week and into the Easter season. May we
not become “worn out by [our Lenten] journey,” but may our joy of Lent soon
become our renewed joy of Easter.
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