In a time of spiritual renewal, God always offers another chance to hit the reset button
Father Michael Pray, campus minister at Gettysburg College, distributes Holy Communion to students during Ash Wednesday Mass.God offers an infinitely loving wellspring of second chances. If you stumble on the road of fulfilling your Lenten sacrifice, a Harrisburg-based spiritual director reminds you that God will not fail in loving you and embracing you.
“Absolutely not, because you have an opportunity to restart,” Donna Giberti says.
“That’s one of the beautiful things about God. He never gives up on us. Even when we fall on our face, when we think that we’ve pulled back from our intention, He never gives up on us.”
So often, the Lenten journey involves making a sacrifice we know is going to be hard through the 40-day penitential season, but perhaps we don’t understand just how challenging it is.
“My own uneducated guess, really from talking to people and just hearing people in spiritual direction, probably 20 percent of people can actually do the full 40 days, because we’re humans. Our human nature includes the ability to fall and fail. It’s part of who we are. It goes back to the original fall, that we are just not perfect people,” Giberti admits.
“If we would not fail, we wouldn’t have to pick ourselves back up again. And if we didn’t have to pick ourselves back up again, we would never call out to Christ to help us.”
The whole point of Lent, Giberti shares, is a journey that draws us closer to Christ – precisely the kind of thing that the imperfections in our good humanity can lead us to do.
“If people were able to do it perfectly, would there really be a sacrifice?” she asks.
“None of this is for us to do alone. It’s always asking Jesus to walk this pathway with us. Every single day, Jesus helped me be able to go farther in whatever exercise plan I decided to try to do these 40 days. Jesus helped me to accept the hunger that I feel in my belly right now and understand that this uncomfortable feeling is just a gift to God. It costs me something, and because it costs me something, it’s a gift of self to God. Through that gift of self, that’s how we grow deeper in our faith.”
In the unofficial way, saints are often and accurately referred to as sinners who fall down and get back up. Giberti says that even the ones whom popes have canonized have fallen, but Christ walked with them towards excellence in loving as God calls.
“The greatest saints who offered everything of self, that difficult giving of everything that they had for God, none of it was easy. That whole pathway wasn’t easy. And yet, you know, it was all for His glory,” Giberti says.
“They couldn’t do it alone. None of it was them alone. It was with God’s grace, walking with them and helping them, guiding and leading them, that they could enter into that higher state from which was the place that they started from.”
Giberti shares that Lent offers this process to help us discard what is not of God, what leads us away from God, and to allow Him to “take the reins.”
“If we truly, truly want to live in His will and bear fruit in His kingdom, a part of us has to die,” she says.
“We’re talking about the fullness of relationship with God Himself. We can’t be wishy-washy in that we have to decide for our own. He always gives us the opportunity.”
Giberti profoundly encourages Catholics to take advantage of the Sacrament of Reconciliation as that powerful encounter, that meeting point where Christ heals that space of sin, where He joins in the discarding of what is not His.
Students at Gettysburg College receive Holy Communion during a campus ministry Mass to start the season of Lent.“When we go in with a truly repentant heart, we go in with true contrition and we pour ourselves out to Christ Himself and say, ‘I failed. I allowed myself to separate myself from you,’” she says, “that’s when the greatest graces come. That’s when forgiveness and mercy come, because He sees us before Him on our knees, just crying our heart out, pouring out to Him our sorrow for having offended Him, for having broken that connection with Him.”
Giberti says the Lenten pathway we’re all on delivers an immense opportunity for us to choose trust in God over the fear that the evil one wants to inject within our hearts.
“As soon as we step into fear, we’re stepping away from God,” she said.
“You can’t have fear and have faith at the same time. We can say, ‘Lord, this might be a really big thing. I’m not quite sure how I’m going to accomplish it. I’m not sure how I’m going to get to the end of Lent and have done this well.’ If we step into it with faith that He is there with us, walking the journey every step of the way, and He’s got our back, then we’ll be successful. Not necessarily at all things every single day, but to the greatest extent possible, we will be successful.”
In a season that is designed to be our spiritual “reset button,” Giberti says we can always turn again to God for another reset.
“God always says every day is a chance for a new start,” she said.
He tells us: “Every single day. I love you as much as I did the day before. It doesn’t matter what you did. It doesn’t matter how far you fell. It doesn’t matter how far away from Me you tried to pull yourself. I still love you.’”
(Gettysburg CCM photos courtesy of Father Michael Pray.)
By Jay Sorgi, The Catholic Witness
