After the Ashes: The Cross as the Splint for our Fractured Freedom

After the Ashes, let us apply the Cross as the Splint for our Fractured Freedom and walk as pilgrims through this 40 Days we call Lent.

CHESAPEAKE (Catholic Online) - On Ash Wednesday we offered ourselves to the Lord as we came forward to be marked with the sign of our repentance, a cross of ashes. We gave our consent, our "Yes" to the Lord's call, which was issued through His Body the Church. We agreed to spend these next 40 Days in prayer, fasting, almsgiving and deep reflection. We lined up behind the Master to accompanying Him into the Desert.

The readings of our Sacred Liturgy all spoke to us of the invitation which we find at the heart of this season we call Lent or the Forty Days. They called for our choice, our response. The exhortation from the Priest or Deacon to "Turn away from Sin and be faithful to the Gospel" or to "Remember man that you are dust and to dust you shall return" were addressed to us in a manner meant to invite a response, to draw us into a protracted and sober reflection on how we are using our freedom. Freedom is that extraordinary uniquely human capacity to choose which makes us like the Lord Himself and, conversely, opens a path to our peril if wrongly exercised.

The Catechism of the Catholic Church, in its treatment of our "Life in Christ" offers a powerful synthesis of the Sacred Scripture and Tradition on the mystery and opportunity of human freedom. For example, it instructs us that "God created man a rational being, conferring on him the dignity of a person who can initiate and control his own actions. "God willed that man should be 'left in the hand of his own counsel,' so that he might of his own accord seek his Creator and freely attain his full and blessed perfection by cleaving to him.(CCC 1730)" The citation offered within the text is from the Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World ("Gaudium et Spes", # 17) and Old Testament Book of Sirach 15:14 which reads, "When God, in the beginning, created man, he made him subject to his own free choice." What follows in the Catechism is a line from the 2d century Church Father and Bishop, Ireneaeus of Lyons: "Man is rational and therefore like God; he is created with free will and is master over his acts."

The implications of this gift of human freedom are broken open in the Catechism in a way that makes it ideal for our Lenten reflection. They are grouped together under the topic of "Freedom and Responsibility": "Freedom is the power, rooted in reason and will, to act or not to act, to do this or that, and so to perform deliberate actions on one's own responsibility. By free will one shapes one's own life. Human freedom is a force for growth and maturity in truth and goodness; it attains its perfection when directed toward God, our beatitude. As long as freedom has not bound itself definitively to its ultimate good which is God, there is the possibility of choosing between good and evil, and thus of growing in perfection or of failing and sinning. This freedom characterizes properly human acts. It is the basis of praise or blame, merit or reproach. The more one does what is good, the freer one becomes. There is no true freedom except in the service of what is good and just. The choice to disobey and do evil is an abuse of freedom and leads to "the slavery of sin. (Romans 6:17) (CCC 1731,1732, 1733)"

Lent is really all about choices. It is a season of remedy, instruction and correction which, if embraced in all of its potential, can help to set us free, able to make those choices which lead us to the fullness of life. The instrument used is what I am calling the Splint of the Cross of Christ. Our prescription is to voluntary embrace its saving/healing potential. Our freedom has been fractured by sin. We dot always choose the path to our true liberation because of what St. Paul called the "law of sin and death" (Romans 8:2). We experience the plight summarized succinctly by the Apostle in his letter to the Romans, "What I do, I do not understand. For I do not do what I want, but I do what I hate." (Romans 7:15) In the words of our Catechism, summarizing the teaching of Scripture and Holy Tradition, there is a reason that we experience this fracture of our freedom: "Freedom and sin. Man's freedom is limited and fallible. In fact, man failed. He freely sinned. By refusing God's plan of love, he deceived himself and became a slave to sin. This first alienation engendered a multitude of others. From its outset, human history attests the wretchedness and oppression born of the human heart in consequence of the abuse of freedom.(CCC 1739)"

One aspect of this reality of "sin" is that it is always an abuse of our use of freedom. Yet, again in the words of the Apostle, it was "for freedom Christ has set us free" (Gal 5:1). We need an education in how to exercise our freedom properly. We need treatment for the fracture occasioned by the original sin of our first parents and the cumulative effect of our own errant exercises of this power of choice. We need the splint of the Cross. In another Section, our Catechism gives us an insight which has the potential of rewriting the continuing story of our lives: "Mortal sin is a radical possibility of human freedom, as is love itself.(CCC #1861) WOW! Because we are created in the Image of God we have the power, the capacity, to choose. But what is more profound is that what we choose not only changes the world around us, our choices change us. Another early 4th century Church Father, Gregory of Nyssa reminds us "We are in a sense our own parents, and we give birth to ourselves by our own free choice of what is good. Such a choice becomes possible for us when we have received God into ourselves and have become children of God, children of the most high. On the other hand, if what the Apostle calls the form of Christ has not been produced in us, we abort ourselves. The man (woman) of God must reach maturity."

This call to grow in maturity, to re-formation, to transformation in Christ, is what these Forty Days of lent are all about. If we embrace the fullness of all the grace offered to us in the sacraments, through our intentional times of fruitful prayer, spiritual reading, reflection, almsgiving, fasting and in the real amendment of our lives, the remedial effects of the Splint of the Cross will be experienced. Then, we will begin to experience true freedom, the freedom of the sons and daughters of God. Our Catechism instructs: " Liberation and salvation. By his glorious Cross Christ has won salvation for all men. He redeemed them from the sin that held them in bondage. "For freedom Christ has set us free." In him we have communion with the "truth that makes us free." The Holy Spirit has been given to us and, as the Apostle teaches, "Where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom. (CCC 1741)" Already now we can glory in the "liberty of the children of God."

So, let us live this Lent, not just let it pass by. As men and women who at our deepest core long for true freedom, let us invite the Lord Jesus Christ to set us free. Let us choose voluntarily to apply the splint of the Cross to those areas in ourselves where we know our freedom has been fractured. It is only by choosing the good, in conforming our choices to the truth revealed in the Natural Law and fully in Jesus Christ, that we can grow in authentic freedom and so become the men and women whom we were created, and re-created in Christ, to become.

Let us keep before us throughout the entirety of our Lenten observance this poignant insight from the Catechism: "The more one does what is good, the freer one becomes. There is no true freedom except in the service of what is good and just. The choice to disobey and do evil is an abuse of freedom and leads to "the slavery of sin.(CCC 1733)" Let us choose, through grace, to change, to grow in the likeness of the One who carried His Cross to free us from the power of sin and the final enemy of death.
Finally, we end where we began, reflecting on the rich teaching offered to us under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit by the Church in our Catechism: "Freedom and grace. The grace of Christ is not in the slightest way a rival of our freedom when this freedom accords with the sense of the true and the good that God has put in the human heart.

"On the contrary, as Christian experience attests especially in prayer, the more docile we are to the promptings of grace, the more we grow in inner freedom and confidence during trials, such as those we face in the pressures and constraints of the outer world. By the working of grace the Holy Spirit educates us in spiritual freedom in order to make us free collaborators in his work in the Church and in the world: 'Almighty and merciful God, in your goodness take away from us all that is harmful, so that, made ready both in mind and body, we may freely accomplish your will.(Prayer of the Roman Missal)(CCC 1742)"

After the Ashes, let us apply the Cross as the Splint for our Fractured Freedom and walk as pilgrims through this 40 Days we call Lent.

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