I had thought of Lent as the Church’s season for self-knowledge and the practices it encourages as the main way to know yourself as a sinner in need of God, but the Church always has a bigger toolset than I thought. She gives us other ways to see who we really are and how much we need God.
Beginning with “Remember that you are dust, and to dust you will return,” during Lent the Church says, “Just look at yourself,” in a more imperative way than she says it the rest of the year. She says it repeatedly and with unusual force because we only sporadically want to, because we know we won’t really like what we see.
In observing Lent the way the Church instructs us to, we proceed on the understanding that sin blinds us, and it especially blinds us to its place in our lives. We need to learn to see, and particularly to see ourselves, more clearly, through more intense self-examination, disciplines like prayer, study and almsgiving, and use of the sacraments.
The Church says, “Just look at yourself,” with the assumption that when we look honestly, we won’t really like what we see, and that new clarity will drive us to Jesus for forgiveness and help in being better. And that works, more or less, within the severe limits of fallen humanity.
But unfortunately, even with all the help Lent gives us, we see ourselves more badly than we can imagine and we resist seeing better. We need more help.
Self-knowledge through friendship
Which the Church provides. There’s another way of seeing more clearly who we are. The Church that says, “Just look at yourself,” also says, “Look at them.” Do you want to understand yourself better? Study Mary and the saints and make friends with them.
I may well have missed something in my development as a Catholic, but the lesson about the saints that I absorbed was to look at them as models and ideals, and as powerful helpers and friends. But not as contrasts, not as sources of self-knowledge. I understood that we can be like them, but not that who they are tells us with some precision something about who we are.
Our friendship with the saints does for us what the practices of Lent do for us, and maybe more easily, naturally and gradually. It works this way, I think.
You enjoy a real friendship with people who love God the way you want to. As you do with friends you can see, you learn as much about them as you can and talk to them as often as you can.
You think about them, about why they are who they are, how they became the people you love, and that should make you see how you are not like them. The friendship being unequal — they being saints and you not — you want to do what they did and be who they were. They’re the kind of friends who, by the quality of their lives, become models.
At the same time, being saints, they aid and encourage you in mysterious ways to love God more. They’re spending their heaven doing good on earth. They want you to be more like them.
The fruits of self-knowledge
You don’t even have to consciously compare and contrast yourself to your saintly friends. You just have to spend time with them to begin to notice the differences and to feel yourself in need of radical improvement. You may actually hate your sins more deeply, not because you see yourself as a worm, but because you see how your sins keep you from being someone you want to be.
We have favorite saints, and I think we tend to find them because we are like them in many ways, especially in the deeper things, the same way you click with some people you meet. The sympathy we feel makes us feel the differences between us more strongly as a distance we want to remove.
The Church’s dogmatic constitution Lumen Gentium explains the deeper way this works: “Just as Christian communion among wayfarers brings us closer to Christ, so our companionship with the saints joins us to Christ. … For every genuine testimony of love shown by us to those in heaven, by its very nature tends toward and terminates in Christ.”
The Church still says, “Look at yourself. You’re a sinner, but God will rescue you if you really want him to and do what he asks.” She also says, “Look at them. You’re not them, not by a long shot, but God and they will help you be more like them.”
