Our Lord continues to teach his disciples and teach us about the greater righteousness that is at the core of his message.  He certainly wants people to follow the commandments, and he always starts there.  But he wants more from us than mere external observance.  He wants our hearts.  He wants our hearts and our minds to be converted; he wants us to feel and to think in different ways.  He wants us to do things like “turn the other cheek.”  He wants us to be kind and generous to all people, even those who can’t or won’t repay our kindness.  He even wants us to love our enemies.  Not just tolerate them, or keep a respectful distance, but actually love them: desire their good, putting aside all grudges and malice.  These things don’t come naturally to us.  God is calling us a greater, deeper righteousness rooted in profound love for all people.  That’s a pretty tall order.  And just like the trust in God that we talked about last week, there’s no switch to flip.  It takes a lifetime of training and practice to grow in this greater righteousness.  You don’t get off the couch and run a marathon immediately.  You don’t play a Beethoven Sonata at your first piano lesson.  Anything hard, anything worthwhile, anything truly interesting, takes hard work, training, and perseverance.  Just like a musician playing scales and exercises for years, or a runner training and pushing himself for years, growing in real holiness, righteousness that’s more than skin deep, takes hard work and perseverance.  

The season of Lent, coming up in just a week-and-a-half, is a time of powerful grace and help from God.  It’s a time for us to renew and deepen our efforts to grow in holiness.  As I mentioned last week, the three great, ancient, timeless tools for this spiritual training, are prayer, fasting, and almsgiving.  I’m going to have some practical suggestions for these three things next week, but I’d like to just talk briefly today about why each of these things is important for us, why each is valuable and indispensable. 

We start with prayer.  Prayer is a funny thing.  It’s a familiar enough concept, but we might not know exactly what it is, or how we are supposed to do it: we might think prayer is something for pious monks in a cold medieval European monastery or for the Nashville Dominicans up the road.  What does prayer mean for me?  For a normal person with a family and a life and a job?  The truth is, everyone wonders how to pray, even monks and nuns and priests and popes.  Even St. Paul himself, an apostle to whom the Lord appeared directly, the greatest evangelist in history, said “We do not know how to pray as we ought.”   One way to think about it is this: prayer is about spending time on a relationship.  You all know as well as I do that, for any relationship in your life to work, at all, you’ve got to spend time on it.  All relationships take time; they grow or fade depending upon the time we devote to them. Prayer is giving time to our most important, most fundamental relationship, our relationship with God, the relationship that makes all other relationships possible.  Whenever we pray, whether by ourselves or in common, whether in our own words or using the ancient prayers of the church, we are in conversation with God, we are tending to that relationship.  Prayer: it’s as simple as time spent with God. 

Fasting.  Not especially popular today.  And not easy to do either in our era of overconsumption.  We are constantly bombarded with advertising and flashing neon lights and all kinds of other stimuli trying to convince us to indulge our every impulse.  These things try to convince us that we won’t be happy unless we eat at that restaurant or buy that pair of shoes.  We can so easily become enslaved to our desires.  But fasting helps us to rule our bodies, rather than be ruled by them.  It helps show our bodies who’s in charge.  When our body tells our mind, “Take me to Wendy’s!” our mind has the strength to say, “No, that’s not what you need right now.”  We have to form that habit and that self-discipline by practicing it over time, and this will develop strength to fight all manner of other more serious temptations when they come up.  You’d be surprised how even very small acts of self-mastery can start to make a huge difference in your life.  And, in small ways, they unite us to the great sacrifice of Christ. 

Almsgiving.  Of course it’s important to be generous with the financial resources that we have to support the church and other charities that we care about.  More importantly for our spiritual life, tithing helps us not to be too attached to money.  But it goes beyond money.  It’s about an attitude of generosity and of self-giving.  It’s about detaching ourselves from the material world.  We all like to support good causes.  But we need to give alms for our own sake too.  It keeps us outwardly focused, helps us remember that everything we have is a gift from God.  It’s all his; we’re just his stewards.  Anything that we have is because of his generosity and love.  He’s given us so much.  We look at the cross and we see a God who gives till it hurts, literally.  And so, since we can’t possibly pay it back, we pay it forward.  We try to give until it hurts.  In every way: our resources, our attention, our time.  Generosity with everything that we have at our disposal, tangible and intangible. 

Prayer, fasting, almsgiving: the Lenten training ground for our growth in holiness and righteousness.  Give some thought about ways you might pray a bit more, fast a bit more, give generously of yourself a bit more.  I’ll give some of my own suggestions next week.  Meantime, we entrust ourselves to the Lord, asking him to purify our hearts and minds, to know, love, and serve him in this life, and to prepare for eternal happiness with him in the next.