The Rule of Our Warfare

By Scott Ferrier, MJ • Phoenix, AZ

Many consecrated people and devout Christians use the time of Lent to enter more deeply into the mysteries of Our Lord and Savior’s public life, death, and resurrection as it has been liturgically and sacramentally celebrated throughout the history of Christianity—forty days of fasting, prayer, penance, and almsgiving in preparation for the joy of Easter and the culmination of the entire Paschal Mystery. The time focuses our attention more especially upon ‘the spiritual combat’ — the duty of self-denial that every soldier of Jesus should be engaged in.

It is a time for using ordinary human means and God’s grace in order to center our thinking, acting, and desires on Christ—that we may continue to be remade in His image. We look at our lives with the intention of rooting out our vices, quieting our passions, and exercising virtue. The goal of the spiritual exercises we make during Lent—and anytime— is union with God through the knowledge and imitation of Jesus Christ. 

We know this will be a struggle because we are living in the devil’s dominion—“a land of unlikeness” where injustice and suffering is “the law of things as they actually are”, in the words of Fr. Edward Leen’s classic In the Likeness of Christ. There are ample opportunities to accept humilities, to sacrifice, and to practice patience, kindness, and charity in the “sacrament of the present moment.” But the hardest of all struggles, says Lorenzo Scupoli, is that while we strive against self, our self is striving against us. In the spiritual combat, our free will is placed between the flesh and the spirit which are in conflict with each other. On the royal road of the Cross, the soldier asks daily, “Where is my heart?” For it is there one locates the wellsprings of good and evil.

“The eye is the lamp of the body. So, if your eye is sound, your whole body will be full of light; but if your eye is not sound, your whole body will be full of darkness. If then the light in you is darkness, how great is the darkness!” Mt. 6:22-23