Alliance for Catholic Education
Lord, Who Throughout These Forty Days verses 1-3
Lord, who throughout these forty days,
For us did fast and pray,
Teach us to overcome our sins,
And close by you to stay.
As you with Satan did contend,
And did the vict'ry win,
O give us strength in you to fight,
In you to conquer sin.
As you did hunger and did thirst,
So teach us, gracious Lord,
To die to self, and so to live
By your most holy word.
Filled with the Holy Spirit, Jesus returned from the Jordan and was led by the Spirit into the desert for forty days, to be tempted by the devil. He ate nothing during those days, and when they were over he was hungry. (Lk 4:1-2)
For us, as parents of young children, and for the wider ACE family and its many Catholic educators, our days are full. Full of life, full of children, full of the demands of work and vocation. It can be difficult to find the space to pray without squirming children wiggling in the pew, to focus on our own spiritual preparation alongside instructing our children in the meaning of this season and its practices. In other words, it can be difficult to find our spiritual desert, the place of retreat and solitude, of self-reflection and renunciation to which we are invited to follow Jesus during these 40 days.
In reflecting upon the lines above, we were drawn to the words “to die to self, and so to live,” from today’s hymn, and to how we experience this in the daily existence of family life as parents and as spouses.
Life with our four energetic and boisterous daughters is beautiful, but it can be draining. When our three-year-old, whose verbal skills are growing and who seems to exercise them unceasingly, is insistent upon a response (and eye contact) to every comment and observation regardless of whatever else we might be doing, we realize acutely that attention is costly.
And while this is the normal stuff of parenting young children, and we are blessed with sweet girls whom we love dearly, whining and bickering and not obeying tries our patience, and the normal stress of work and managing the home takes a toll. We get tired and impatient. Yet, we are constantly called to give and love and make little sacrifices for each other and for our daughters.
The busyness of family life and work – especially for Catholic educators during these past years – can seem like impediments to the spiritual stillness and introspection of the desert. But there is another way to see these places and experiences.
Rather than sources of stress and distraction that prevent us from retreating into the desert to fast and pray, perhaps they – the home and the classroom – are also spiritual deserts, both for us and the children we serve.
The home and the classroom are places set apart, places of preparation, as the desert was for Jesus before his earthly ministry. And even while they are places of deep joy, they are also places to confront our temptations, our failures to love, and to learn to love more deeply. In this way, the family is a school of love, and so too are our Catholic schools.
Family is where we bump up against each other in the most natural and difficult of ways. It is often the very ones we love the most who we may fail to love most often: our siblings, our classmates, our spouses, our children, and our students. Temptations to sin abound! But the home and the classroom are also the places where we (both adults and children) form habits of virtue, where we fail, repent, learn, and strive to be better, encouraged in these trials by those who love and accept us.
Thus, the home and the classroom can be spiritual deserts, even in their fullness. They are places of renunciation, places where we are constantly invited to die to ourselves that we may enter into love more deeply. They are also the places where we prepare our children, fortifying them with faith and love and virtue, for their future vocations. But so too for us as adults. The home is our place of daily retreat, yet also an invitation to give ourselves away more fully, and in doing so, to enter more fully into love and life.
We pray during this Lent that we may find the deserts where we dwell; that we may “die to self, and so to live;” that we prepare well our hearts and the children we serve in Catholic schools for the love and deep joy that we await at the end of this season of hope and new life.