Lent Is Life, Because God Has Lent Us Life, by Joseph Pearce
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https://www.ncregister.com/blog/pearce-lent-is-life-life-is-lent?utm_content=326729602&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter&hss_channel=tw-20064348
By Joseph Pearce, National Catholic Register,
Joseph Pearce Joseph Pearce is Visiting Professor of Literature at Ave Maria University and a Visiting Fellow of Thomas More College of Liberal Arts (Merrimack, New Hampshire). The author of more than 30 books, he is editor of the St. Austin Review, series editor of the Ignatius Critical Editions, senior instructor with Homeschool Connections, and senior contributor at the Imaginative Conservative and Crisis Magazine. His personal website is jpearce.co.
This season reminds us that our lives are not our own — they are a gift from God.
The Lenten season begins with Ash Wednesday’s memento mori; its reminder that we are dust and to dust we are destined to return. Nor are such sobering reminders of our mortality restricted to the liturgy. Literature is full of such reminders. Gerard Manley Hopkins’ masterful meditation on the mystery of suffering, “The Wreck of the Deutschland,” sees us as “soft sift in an hourglass.” Each of us has our apportioned share of the sand of life and there’s nothing we can do stop it slipping through our hands. Again, it is Hopkins who spells it out or, in the context of the hourglass imagery, spills it out:
“Some find me a sword; some
The flange and the rail; flame,
Fang, or flood” goes Death on drum,
And storms bugle his fame.
But we dream we are rooted in earth — Dust!
Flesh falls within sight of us, we, though our flower the same,
Wave with the meadow, forget that there must
The sour scythe cringe, and the blear share come.
