Each month I receive in the mail a small envelope from the proprietor of an old bookstore in the French Quarter of New Orleans. Inside is a brief document, usually only one page double-sided, on which is printed that month’s edition of fresh translations of French philosophers and writers ranging from the early modern era (this month’s includes a poem by Marguerite d’Autriche [1480-1530]) to contemporary thinkers (like extracts from the yet untranslated opus of Baptiste Rappin). These selections range in length. Some months’ are composed of a litany of small sentence-length quips. Others are consumed entirely by only one or two lengthy excerpts from dense texts (and are printed in pt 9 or pt 10 font to accommodate their length).
Each month’s mailing is different. Each one delightful.
This month’s selections seem especially Lenten. Two in particular stand-out:
“All desires of grandeur come from the emptiness of an unquiet heart.” —Francoise d’Aubigne, la marquise de Maintenon [1635-1719]
“But, Monsieur Voltaire, avowed lover of the truth, tell me, in good faith, have you found it? You fight and destroy all errors; but what do you put in their place?” —Marie de Vicy-Chamrond, la marquise du Deffand [1697-1780] (from a letter to Voltaire).
Both share in common a sharp reproach to all manner of disquiet and rapaciousness. Both speak to the kind of inner hunger that does not, in fact, desire satisfaction but only the distension of its appetite for an unqualified “more”. Hunger for the sake of hunger.
Have you noted the ways in which fasting boils our appetites, bringing to the surface of our waking awareness all kinds of demands and cravings we would otherwise never have struggled to resist? “Haggis? I’ve never even had haggis! Where is this demand for haggis coming from?” Lent is a gift of grace wherein the Spirit works in us individually and also corporately to expose our inner rapacity and un-moored consumptiveness.
Lent exposes, moreover, the unquietness of our hearts. By suspending for a moment (a handful of weeks, not counting Sundays) those creature comforts with which we mute but never really quiet the deeps of our heart, Lent makes us aware of all the ways we are not really at rest in the Lord.
Fasting and penitence reveal the ways in which we’ve mistaken the grandeur which masks the emptiness of an unquiet heart for happiness.
Lent also exposes our rapacity for “being proven right.” Voltaire was a man ostensibly in search of the truth and yet his hunger to devour all error led him ultimately into the deepest kind of ignorance: oblique skepticism. He “saw through every charade,” except his own. And nobody ever “pulled one over on him,” except himself. Lent therefore, even as it exposes our hunger-for-hunger’s-sake also does more than merely tear-down. It also builds-up. It not merely destroys errors, it also “puts something into the place” of our unbridled rapaciousness. Lent is not merely about the destruction of idols and errors, it is about being filled with the Spirit. It is about the Onething being put back into first place (cf. Ps. 27.4; Mk. 19.17-31; Lk. 10.41-42).
In so doing it spares us from the horror of self-deception and the addiction to being proven right above actually being made right. It liberates us from the kind of happiness that comes from the emptiness of an unquiet heart, which is really just a kind of induced absentia from the Cross of the here-and-now in which we encounter God and Other and hungry self.