In his 1979 Apostolic Exhortation on catechesis, Catechesi Tradendae, Saint John Paul II outlined a catechetical principle of perennial importance: “God himself used a pedagogy that must continue to be a model for the pedagogy of faith.” In other words, as God teaches us, we must seek to teach one another. This principle came to mind on reading the Entrance Antiphon of the Ash Wednesday Mass:
You are merciful to all, O Lord,
and despise nothing that you have made.
You overlook people’s sins, to bring them to repentance,
and you spare them, for you are the Lord our God (Wis 11: 24, 25, 27).
We see here a splendid divine pedagogy at work: God, very much a loving father, encourages us to undertake the daunting task of Lenten conversion using kind and hopeful words, rather than with crushing words of bitter condemnation. God, through his Church’s liturgy, does not dwell on the reality of our sinfulness, but rather He gives us hope of a solution from the outset: He is merciful, He loves us and is indulgent towards us, and He himself will lead us out of sin.
Following St John Paul’s insight into the relationship between divine and human pedagogy, it becomes clear what should be the attitude of the Christian to the fallen world in which he lives and of which he is very much a part. We don’t need to stress the negative aspects of the world unduly, but must try to offer solutions to problems and renew hope in those around us who have very often fallen into a veiled kind of despair.
The Christian must resist the temptation to alienation from a world which has to a large degree turn its back on God. Those who fall into such a bitter alienation can do nothing do bring the world back to God. In Vasily Grossman’s fictionalised account of life in Stalin’s Gulags, Everything Flows, he includes a description of two elderly nuns who have fallen into this condition. He describes their disdainful aloofness towards their fellow “criminals” (a mix of political prisoners and ordinary, and often quite barbaric, thieves) in the camps:
The two old nuns, Varvara and Ksenya, would exchange quick whispers the moment any sinner approached them. Then they would fall silent. They lived in a world apart. … Their holiness was visible in their clothes, in their white kerchiefs, in their pursed lips, but in their eyes was only cold indifference – and contempt for the sins and sufferings of the camps.
An attitude of cold and contemptuous indifference – of “pursed lips” – towards the sinful world may indeed preserve a Christian’s feeling of unsullied purity but it also obviates any possibility of actually lifting one’s fellow man out of their misery (and of course only accentuates the delusion of personal impeccability), and in the end God’s divine pedagogy finds no echo on earth.
Lent is a summons to engagement with the misery of the world. The Christian, Pope Francis teaches us in his 2017 Lenten message, must not adopt the attitude of aloof indifference of the Rich Man of the Gospel when faced with the miserable Lazarus at his gate. Lazarus must be for us rather, “a face, and as such, a gift, a priceless treasure, a human being whom God loves and cares for, despite his concrete condition as an outcast.”
This is brought out in a tale told by another Russian novelist, Leo Tolstoy, in his short story ‘What Men Live By’ which tells the tale of an angel, Michael, who for disobeying a task given him by God, is cast down to earth in the form of a naked, pale beggar. He is adopted by a kind and humble shoemaker and Michael’s return to his original angelic form is made possible by the kindness of the shoemaker and his wife. It is only through the personal experience of human affection that Michael comes to solve the mystery of man: “I have now understood that though it seems to men that they live by care for themselves, in truth it is love alone by which they live. He who has love, is in God, and God is in him, for God is love.” Without the personal experience of human love divine love remains opaque.