Making Your Quarantine Lenten

I’ve already pointed this out on Facebook, but this is kind of beautiful… “Quarantine” is from quadraginta (“forty days”), and it’s the basis for the word for “Lent” in Latin (Quadragesima) Old English (Quarentyne), Spanish (Cuaresma), French (Carême), and Italian (Quaresima).

Are you letting your quarantine be a true Quadragesima?

Maybe you’re wondering how to do that better. I think one way is to recognize and embrace all of the ways that we’ve been stripped of our material comforts and our little idols this Lent. Pope Francis today called all of us to gather together for a televised prayer service at which he gave a short reflection on Scripture, spent time before the Blessed Sacrament, and gave the Urbi et Orbi blessing (“to the City [of Rome] and the World”) that is usually given only at a papal election, and at Christmas and Easter.

Seeing the pope stand amidst a dark and deserted St. Peter’s square was haunting. Perhaps more haunting were the Holy Father’s words. He was meditating on Mark 4:35-41 (in which the boat is sinking, and Jesus is asleep, and the disciples panic), and he said:

The storm exposes our vulnerability and uncovers those false and superfluous certainties around which we have constructed our daily schedules, our projects, our habits and priorities. It shows us how we have allowed to become dull and feeble the very things that nourish, sustain and strengthen our lives and our communities. The tempest lays bare all our prepackaged ideas and forgetfulness of what nourishes our people’s souls; all those attempts that anesthetize us with ways of thinking and acting that supposedly ‘save’ us, but instead prove incapable of putting us in touch with our roots and keeping alive the memory of those who have gone before us. We deprive ourselves of the antibodies we need to confront adversity.

Instead, he encouraged us:

Let us invite Jesus into the boats of our lives. Let us hand over our fears to him so that he can conquer them. Like the disciples, we will experience that with him on board there will be no shipwreck. Because this is God’s strength: turning to the good everything that happens to us, even the bad things. He brings serenity into our storms, because with God life never dies.

In light of this, I propose three questions that might make for a good Lenten reflection today:

1. Who are the people in my life that I take for granted? The Pope highlighted the often-forgotten work done by “doctors, nurses, supermarket employees, cleaners, caregivers, providers of transport, law and order forces, volunteers, priests, religious men and women and so very many others.”
2. What in my life truly nourishes my soul?
3. What are the things in my life that anesthetize my soul, or interfere with its nourishment? In other words, where have I settled for “junk food”?

A good resolution would be to thank the people in (1), spend more time on the things in (2), and reduce or cut out [during Lent and maybe forever!] the things in (3).