Passion Sunday, Dame Aemiliana Lohr, The Mass throughout the Year, Volume 1

Passion Sunday, Dame Aemiliana Lohr, OSB The Mass throughout the Year, Volume 1

The Church has taken up the trouble of the bodily fast in order to cleanse her spirit. Abstinence in food and drink, the giving up of comfort and what is pleasant to bodily life makes the spirit more sensitive, more receptive, more awake to what is not earthly, to what belongs to God. Again and again the prayers for the Lenten season emphasize the end of the fast, and ask from God the spiritual accomplishment of the bodily mortification which— one cannot say this too often—is not, for the Christian, an end in itself. An old preface for Lent begs that the strict control of undisciplined earthly desires may cause the pure and peaceful longing for the sight of the mysteries of heaven to rise once more in the faithful as they mortify themselves throughout these forty days. To prepare themselves, 'to know the mystery of Christ', to make themselves ready for the great coming of Easter was the wish of the Church in those days. In ever new and lively forms she returns to these themes in the fast prayers of the Gelasian Sacramentary. With this vision of the end ahead, the sight of the heavenly mysteries, the fast and the whole exercise of the Forty Days becomes for the Church a part of the Easter mysteries, a sacrament of the Forty Days', as an ancient prayer for the first Sunday in Lent expresses it.