Mystery, Love, and the First Friday of Lent

It’s the first Friday of Lent and it’s the day the Church has assigned the reading about Christ as the bridegroom.

I always found this reading to be odd as a child and as a young person. My limited understanding connected the idea that priests didn’t get married with Jesus being a bridegroom and left me confused. As I studied the Bible at school, I learned the historical and literary contexts in which these passages were written but the true meaning aside from these sources always possessed a mystery well beyond what anyone has ever explained to me.

I remember attending Stations of the Cross with my grandparents every Friday during Lent after evening mass. It was a solemn time but also powerful. There was a mystery in the air - our parish church was large and usually dimly lit - it was dark outside - and the images in the stained glass weren’t very discernible. I remember feeling a profound sense of meaning but could never articulate it - it always reminded me of the tense quiet the story of the night of Passover inspired in me. I could never put my finger on it and still to this day I struggle to identify the atmosphere of the church on those nights. As the years passed, I began to realize that it was a mystery - perhaps some form of the Paschal Mystery. There was something big and unknowable - overwhelmingly inconceivable that was draped over the world on that first Lent as Jesus entered the desert, and every year during Lent since. Our church symbolized it by draping all the statues and images of Jesus in a purple cloth. Seeing those covered forms in the semi-darkness of the church heightened the sense of mystery. I wasn’t scared but perhaps felt a little vulnerable. Just as that feeling would begin to overwhelm me, I would look at my grandparents and feel a great sense of security and love. I didn’t realize that the mystery of the church and the love I felt were of the same source.

As an adult, the mystery is not gone but shifted. For me, it’s the mystery of the bridegroom - the mystery of love. The idea of love seems an unfathomable entity. Not just any love, but a deep commitment and sacrificial love that is mysterious and unable to be pinned down or defined. What is the reason for sacrifice? What is the deepest form of commitment? Suddenly Jesus as the bridegroom makes a nanosecond flash of sense in my mind: Jesus is making a covenant with the people, entering into a mysterious and sacred bond that will result in him sacrificing himself - fulfilling the words spoken at the Last Supper that to lay down one's life for one’s friends is the greatest act of love. And as quickly as the burst of understanding has come, it is gone. It’s beyond the intellectual or emotional idea of love. Why would someone sacrifice himself for another? Doesn’t it make more sense to have fled and hid so he could keep sharing time with his disciples?

So what do I do with this seemingly fleeting feeling of love and understanding? For me, this Lent, perhaps I need to act out of love in my Lenten promises rather than deprive myself of something. Maybe in seeing myself as loved, I will find the impetus for me to make my Lenten promises.

I never seem to be able to hold on to that mysterious and profound feeling of the dimly lit Our Lady of the Wayside Church I experienced as a boy, but the sentient memory of it has led me to see Lent as a recommitment of the covenant with the bridegroom, Jesus.

(Image: The mosaic behind the altar at Our Lady of the Wayside Church, Johannesburg South Africa)

Author: Max von Schlehenried, Science Department