By Dominic V. Cassella
During the time of Lent, the Church enters the desert to fast and abstain. It is a time of trial. The number forty usually indicates this throughout the Scriptures. “Forty days” points to a time in which God tests the hearts of his people, so that what lies hidden within them may be revealed.
In Genesis, the flood that washed the world of living creatures—except for Noah and those who were in the ark—lasted forty days. Moses fled from Egypt for his life after killing a man and spent forty years in Midian as a shepherd before God appeared to him in the burning bush. After forty days, the ten spies whom Moses sent to the land convinced Israel to distrust God and despair of its ability to conquer it. For forty years, the Israelites were sent to wander in the desert before they could occupy the Promised Land. For forty days and nights, Goliath challenged Saul and his army before David killed him. And Jonah gave the Ninevites forty days to repent before they were destroyed by God.
And in the most famous case of all, of course, Jesus spent forty days in the desert and was tempted by the Devil.
These periods of forty days or forty years are not random spans of time. They reveal a pattern in the way God deals with his people. As Moses says to Israel:
The Lord your God has led you these forty years in the wilderness, to humble you, testing you to know what was in your heart, whether you would keep his commandments or not. (Deuteronomy 8:2)
God does not test human beings because he needs to learn something about the fidelity of his creatures. He already knows the human heart. (1 Samuel 16:7) The test exists so that man himself may discover what is within him. Abraham was tested by God and came to know his total trust in the Lord. In contrast, Pharaoh was tested by God and hardened his heart.
Now that we are in the midst of these forty days of Lent, we have entered the same biblical pattern of trial and purification. Lent should not be like any other season of life. During this time, we should especially have our eyes fixed on the heavenly Promised Land, and above all on the Way that leads to it: Jesus Christ.
However, Lent often passes in vain. Our hearts are not easily moved. They become sluggish and indolent when left uncared for. In the stagnation of idle thoughts, the heart becomes a thick desert of thorns and thistles, tangled with brambles and covered with stones.
This inner desert is a consequence of sin, both actual and original. When Adam and Eve rebelled against God and tried to decide for themselves what was good and what was evil, the curse of that desert was the natural consequence.
St. John Henry Newman describes this condition:
We have hearts of stone, hearts as hard as the paths; the story of Christ makes no impression on them. And yet, if we are to be saved, we must have tender, sensitive, and living hearts; our hearts must be broken, they must be plowed like the earth, dug, watered, tended, and cultivated, until they become gardens, gardens of Eden, pleasing to our God, gardens in which the Lord God may walk and dwell; filled, not with brambles and thorns, but with every fragrant and useful plant, with heavenly trees and flowers.
An uncared-for and frivolous heart gradually becomes a hardened heart. But the Desert Fathers teach that the remedy for such a heart is meditation on the Cross.
For example, St. John Cassian describes this remedy and tells us that we Christians must be “daily and constantly plowing the soil of our heart with the plow of the Gospel, that is, the constant remembrance of the Lord’s Cross”.
The hard soil of the heart cannot cultivate itself. The desert of the heart must first be cleared of vain thoughts, and then the heart can be plowed with the plow of the Gospel, the Cross. Just as the plow tears up the earth, the Cross breaks the hardened heart. Meditation on the Lord’s Cross during this time of Lent, and the formation of a habit of frequent meditation and prayer, allows Christ to enter and stir the hardened soil of the heart.
When Christ enters the desert for forty days at the beginning of his ministry, he enters the desert of our hardened hearts. During these forty days of Lent, we can invite him to take the plow of the Gospel and uproot the thorns, turn over the stones, and open the hardened earth. When we meditate on the Cross, on the nails, on the thorns, on the scourging, and on the complete humiliation that the Word of God assumed for the salvation of man, our hearts are cleansed and softened. Through meditation, the soil of the heart becomes receptive and the seed of the Word can take root.
When we complete these forty days of trial, we will come out of the desert into the garden where Jesus Christ was buried. (John 19:41) On that day we will find an empty tomb and encounter the risen Christ. There it will not be a mistake if we turn to Jesus Christ, as Mary Magdalene did, and take him for the gardener. (John 20:15) For just as the first Adam was placed in the garden “to till it and keep it” (Genesis 2:15), so the new Adam (1 Corinthians 15:45), Jesus Christ, is the gardener of the New Creation.
And the garden that Jesus Christ desires to tend is the heart of man.
About the author:
Dominic V. Cassella is a husband and father. He is a graduate of Thomas More College of Liberal Arts and currently a doctoral candidate at The Catholic University of America. Mr. Cassella is also an editorial and online assistant at The Catholic Thing.