Lent is often understood as a time of personal spiritual renewal—40 days to focus on practices that deepen one’s relationship with Christ. There is something noble, good, and true in these practices, but they only partially express the heart of the season. Lent is more than a time of individual spiritual growth. In its fullness, Lent is a liturgical season of preparation. Preparation for what? Easter, certainly—but not for Easter hams, Easter eggs, Easter brunch, or Easter baskets. Lent prepares the Church and her members for the liturgical celebration of the Paschal Mystery—the saving events of Christ’s passion, death, and resurrection.
This is, in fact, how the Church herself defines the season: “Lent is ordered to preparing for the celebration of Easter, since the Lenten liturgy prepares for celebration of the Paschal Mystery both catechumens, by the various stages of Christian Initiation, and the faithful, who recall their own Baptism and do penance” (Universal Norms for the Liturgical Year and Calendar, 27; cf. SC, 109). Lent, then, is meant to be an extended and intensive period of liturgical formation.
Historically, Lent took shape as a period of intense preparation for the sacraments of initiation. Once the catechumenate was firmly established by the fourth century, Lent became the final stage of preparation for those to be baptized at the Easter Vigil. The season was also ordered toward the reconciliation of public penitents, whose restoration to communion followed the same paschal pattern of dying and rising with Christ.
The season of Lent and its disciplines are ordered toward formation for the liturgy—purification for participation. Prayer, fasting, and almsgiving are precisely these “venerable exercises,” forming the heart for authentic participation in the Church’s celebration of the Paschal Mystery.
But Lenten preparation is not confined to catechumens and penitents. The Church’s own prayers make clear that these 40 days have a purpose for all the faithful. At the very start of Lent, on Ash Wednesday, the priest asks God to grant that, as the faithful “follow the Lenten observances, they may be worthy to come with minds made pure to celebrate the Paschal Mystery of your Son.” Later, on Thursday of the third week of Lent, the Collect echoes this same petition: “We implore your majesty most humbly, O Lord, that, as the feast of our salvation draws ever closer, so we may press forward all the more eagerly towards the worthy celebration of the Paschal Mystery.” In these prayers, “celebrating the Paschal Mystery” refers specifically to the Church’s participation in the Paschal Mystery made present in the liturgies of Easter. The Missal is clear that the season of Lent and its disciplines are ordered toward formation for the liturgy—purification for participation.
The Church celebrates the Paschal Mystery every Sunday, but she does so with greatest intensity at Easter. “Since Christ accomplished his work of human redemption and of the perfect glorification of God principally through his Paschal Mystery, in which by dying he has destroyed our death, and by rising restored our life, the sacred Paschal Triduum of the Passion and Resurrection of the Lord shines forth as the high point of the entire liturgical year. Therefore the preeminence that Sunday has in the week, the Solemnity of Easter has in the liturgical year” (Universal Norms for the Liturgical Year and Calendar, 18). At the beginning of Holy Week, the Palm Sunday liturgy highlights the intensely paschal character of the days ahead: “Today we gather together to herald with the whole Church the beginning of the celebration of our Lord’s Paschal Mystery, that is to say, of his Passion and Resurrection.”
If Easter is the Church’s most concentrated celebration of the Paschal Mystery, then Lent is the Church’s most intentional preparation for it. Our Lenten observances are ordered toward forming in us the dispositions needed to celebrate the Easter liturgy more worthily and fruitfully. On Tuesday of the fourth week of Lent, the Collect makes this explicit: “May the venerable exercises of holy devotion shape the hearts of your faithful, O Lord, to welcome worthily the Paschal Mystery and proclaim the praises of your salvation.” Prayer, fasting, and almsgiving are precisely these “venerable exercises,” forming the heart for authentic participation in the Church’s celebration of the Paschal Mystery.
Lent concentrates what should be the shape of the whole Christian life…. Thus, when the Paschal Mystery is celebrated…the faithful may participate in it worthily and fruitfully, and be interiorly conformed to the mystery they celebrate.
It is worth asking, then, how our Lenten disciplines can be directed toward a more fruitful participation in the Paschal Mystery made present in the liturgy at Easter. Increased prayer, for instance, forms us in attentive listening to God, who still speaks to his people when the Scriptures are proclaimed in the liturgy. Fasting trains us in self-denial—the ability to forego our preferences—an interior disposition essential for entering into corporate worship with others. Almsgiving directs us to the corporal works of mercy and reminds us that those nourished by the Eucharistic liturgy are sent forth in active service. As Pope St. John Paul II reminds us, “To experience the joy of the Risen Lord deep within is to share fully the love which pulses in his heart: there is no joy without love!” (Dies Domini, 69). Pope Benedict XVI echoes this point, saying, “A Eucharist which does not pass over into the concrete practice of love is intrinsically fragmented” (Deus Caritas Est, 14).
Pope Pius XII described the dispositions proper to participation in the liturgy in terms that fit Lent perfectly: “all Christians should possess, as far as is humanly possible, the same dispositions as those which the divine Redeemer had when He offered Himself in sacrifice: that is to say, they should in a humble attitude of mind, pay adoration, honor, praise and thanksgiving to the supreme majesty of God. Moreover, it means that they must assume to some extent the character of a victim, that they deny themselves as the Gospel commands, that freely and of their own accord they do penance and that each detests and satisfies for his sins. It means, in a word, that we must all undergo with Christ a mystical death on the cross so that we can apply to ourselves the words of St. Paul, ‘With Christ I am nailed to the cross’” (Mediator Dei, 81). Lent concentrates what should be the shape of the whole Christian life: a continual participation in Christ’s dying and rising through conversion and penance. Thus, when the Paschal Mystery is celebrated—whether at the Easter Vigil or on any Sunday of the year—the faithful may participate in it worthily and fruitfully, and be interiorly conformed to the mystery they celebrate.
