The Second Reading for Ash Wednesday, 2 Corinthians 5:20-6:2, ought to set our perspective about how properly to use Lent—this “season of grace and favor,” as one of the Lenten Prefaces used to speak of it. In that reading, St. Paul does two things: he calls on Christians to “be reconciled to God,” and he calls on them to do that now. Let’s consider both appeals.
1. Conversion.
Conversion is the central focus of Lent because it is the central focus of the Christian life. People’s fundamental problem is sin. Man’s problems are what they are because his relationships are warped. They are warped because his most important relationship—with God—is warped. And that warping is his own doing.
If there’s anything that shows that the “ethic of choice” is wrong, it’s right here. Human beings chose and choose evil. They flee the Light and “loved darkness . . . because their deeds were evil” (John 3:19). And the self-destructive consequences of those choices is evident to anybody willing to open his eyes, though those who deny what is before their eyes convict themselves of evil (John 9:41).
Two formulae are authorized for the imposition of ashes on Ash Wednesday. The traditional one alludes to the consequence of sin, death, to which we are subject: “Remember man, that you are dust, and to dust you will return.” But the second one—“Repent and believe the good news”—is hardly a modern invention. In fact, it essentially repeats Jesus’ first words recorded in Mark’s Gospel (1:15): “Repent and believe the Gospel!”
Conversion is an ongoing, lifelong element of the Christian life. Why? Perhaps it is useful to employ a distinction Bernard Häring makes between what he calls “first” and “second” conversion. “First conversion” is a renunciation of sin, particularly mortal sin, and a turning to Christ. First conversion is what baptism is about. And, as the Church teaches, the Christian who commits post-baptismal mortal sin needs the sacrament of penance as much as he once needed baptism to make that necessary first conversion.
Without first conversion, we are lost. Without first conversion, we are in our sins. Grace and mortal sin cannot coexist, because man cannot simultaneously truly love and hate God.
But turning from what radically separates us from God—first conversion from sin—does not mean we are perfect. Our human experience tells us that. But God is perfect, and he once made us “to be holiness and blameless in His sight” (Eph. 1:4). That we choose not to be does not change what he made and intended us to be. And nothing sinful, nothing imperfect can stand in the presence of God. That is why we need “second conversion”—to recognize the ongoing need throughout our lives to uproot the venial sins, the bad habits, the imperfections, the selfishness that continue to mar our relationship with God.
Yes, if our spiritual circulation is cut off by blockage, we need spiritual stenting, first conversion. But unless we also change our diet, the little buildup of toxins can eventually predispose to a new spiritual infarction.
In a special way, Lent focuses on this everyday business of conversion—everyday, because whenever we recite the “Our Father,” we are asking God to forgive as we forgive … and that is an ongoing work.
2. Conversion now.
In a real sense, every moment is the time for conversion because, as the “Hail Mary” reminds us, we are guaranteed but two moments: “now” and “the hour of our death.” So every moment is a call to turn from sin and to turn to God.
Conversion is only secondarily our doing. It is God who takes the initiative to call us back to him; our “conversion” is our response to that call, our willingness to let God’s grace be effective in our lives. But God’s grace does not cancel our freedom; even if today we hear his voice, we can “harden our hearts.”
Grace, by its definition, is gratuitous. It is a free gift, not an entitlement. That God is “rich in mercy” should not lead us to presumption, a sin that expects God’s graces and relies on them to continue in sin. We should be particularly sensitive to presumption in this jubilee year of hope, because presumption (like its opposite number, despair) is a sin against hope.
So if God is offering his grace now, it is both foolhardy and ungrateful to refuse it, to put it off, to expect the offer to be renewed at a time we deem convenient. Yet that is always the temptation with conversion: as it was said jokingly of St. Augustine, he prayed, “Lord, convert me . . . tomorrow!” That’s not guaranteed (see Luke 12:20).
Lent is a particularly appropriate time for conversion, a “time of grace and favor,” because it leads us directly to the Paschal Triduum, the three most important days not just of the Church year, but of salvation history, when Jesus made possible for us to turn from sin and to be reconciled with God. Unless we make ourselves part of that offer of salvation, Easter is essentially meaningless to us. Worse, it becomes a judgment against us.
Lent is also the appropriate time for conversion because our salvation is not just “me and God”; rather, it involves the whole Christian community—i..e., the Church.
“It has pleased God to make men holy and save them not merely as individuals, without bond or link between them, but by making them into a single people, a people which acknowledges him in truth and serves Him in holiness” (Gaudium et Spes 32). Lent is the special time where the whole Church focuses together, in mutual support, on that work of conversion.
Häring also pointed out that Greek had two words for time: chronos and kairos. Chronos is the time we measure, the minutes and days, “chronological.” Kairos, however, is a special and unique sense of time, a moment of “opportunity,” a moment of grace. Let’s consider Lent our kairos, our spiritual opportunity of grace. We should not presume that it will knock twice.