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Augustine, True Religion, 50.98. If we are not yet able to cling to this Eternity, let us at least scold the fanciful products of our imaginations and turn the gaze of our minds away from the spectacle of such trifling and deceptive games. Let us make use of the steps which divine providence has been good enough to construct for us. You see, by taking too much pleasure in such laughable fictions, the whole fabric of our thinking was growing threadbare, and we were turning the whole of our lives into nothing but empty dreams which had enslaved to their laws the reason we were created with.
The Church’s calendar included the ‘Gesima’ season for more than 1,000 years to prepare the Christian community for the Lenten season and the joy of Eastertide that crowned the whole of the year and, ultimately, the whole of human life. Sadly, the modern revisions of the Church’s calendar in the 1960s and 70s removed this preparatory season reasoning that these were antique elements that had lost their importance in the modern age. The devotions of the Sundays of Septuagesima, Sexagesima and Quinquagesima, ponderous names for Sundays counting the days to Easter, were redundant and therefore expendable. The 40 days of Lent, spread across six weeks of devotion and fasting were sufficient preparation for the Easter celebration. Why prepare for Lent, which is itself preparatory? So, in the spirit of efficiency, the Gesimas have been abandoned.
But efficiency, for all its industrial and financial benefits, does not necessarily benefit the soul, or the forming of Christian virtue. Instead, Jesus invites his disciples to take up their cross and follow him wherever he leads, as long as he leads them. St. Paul reminds the Thessalonians that they should pray, and pray without ceasing. That the formation of the soul is efficient only insofar as it ends in eternal glory. And eternity is a very long time. And yet we are invited to prepare for eternity in the present, which feels long to young people, but shorter and shorter the longer we live. Indeed, this present age is infinitely short compared to eternity. Nonetheless, it serves as a time of preparation, apprenticing for the moment that we come into the presence of Almighty God. And what does apprenticing for glory involve? Loving what is good and hating what is evil.
Augustine reminds us of how natural human beings get confused between temporality and eternity. Our senses of sight and sound, taste and smell, appetite and emotion, tempt us to think that the physical world around us is the only one that exists. And why not! The beauty of the night sky, a Bach cantata, the smell of fresh baked bread, the love of wife and children are all evidently good things. And they make us happy, which is what human beings desire above all things. Augustine doesn’t disagree, indeed he appeals to human happiness as the foundation of virtue. Humans want to be happy forever! But all of the things that we perceive around us are passing away. Where can we find eternal happiness? Eternal happiness can only be found in the God who is himself eternal, and in the eternal city that he will reveal when this world has come to an end. This world will come to an end, and all the beauty that is finite will pass away, but eternal things will be redeemed and renovated by the overwhelming love of Almighty God.
This being the case, the Gesimas or pre-Lenten season, is the moment in the Church’s calendar in which the Scriptures and the Church call us away from the goods of this world and invite us to raise our affections to those that our heavenly father has prepared for those who love him. The gospel lesson for Septuagesima tells of the landowner who hired laborers to work in his field throughout the day, even until dusk. Each of them received a day’s wage for their labor. The epistle lesson from Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians uses the metaphor of physical discipline, running and boxing, to make a similar point. That our heavenly father, the landowner, will bless those who have struggled to bring in the fruit of good living with the gift of eternal life. The gospel for Sexagesima presents us with the parable of the seed, or perhaps the soils, where we are left to ask, ‘Which soil are we? Do we allow the cares of the world to choke the faith delivered to us in the word of God, or do we bring forth fruit with patience?’ Paul’s own testimony to his sufferings stand as a stark reminder of what Jesus’ call may require of each one of us. And finally, Quinquagesima’s Gospel contrasts the puzzlement of the disciples with the clear-eyed faith of Bartimaeus, the blind man. This is paired with Paul’s striking exhortation to love as the greatest of virtues. Who can see Jesus for who he truly is, the savior of the world? Only the one who loves him as his savior and is willing to follow him along the road to Calvary.
The Gesimas set the tone of preparation for the Lenten journey that not only reveals the divine love in the death of our Lord Jesus, but is meant to call us away from loving corruptible things to loving the most desirable thing in the world: God himself.
