For Saint Augustine, love proved everything.

After learning all that one could, the theologian mustn’t be proud, he said. Rather, he or she should remember Paul’s warning that “knowledge puffs up, but charity edifies” (1 Cor 8:1). However much one may learn, only sharing in the suffering of Christ will save him (De Doctrina Christiana 2.41.62). That is, both faith and works are useless unless you also love, as God so loved the world that he gave his only Son. Thus, in reading scripture, in work, in study, in leisure, in all these human endeavors, their worth is known only by the love these things share in and spread. It makes no difference to the glory of God or to the Church that you know anything, or that you do anything, or that you give this, that, or the other thing to the Church or to anything else. Because they make no difference insofar as they are empty of love. Like a good marriage or a good friendship, our relationship with God cannot just be works and ideas. It must be a love affair.

Love is at the heart of Lent. In this season we are reminded through our fasts and added prayers, through our sacrifice and confession, that it is not enough that we simply get our ideas right about God. It will not do just to belong to the Church as if it were a political group and not an organic body. We must love God with all the bodily, emotional, and intellectual energy we can muster. Our life with God must be a genuine love affair with all that entails. God must invade your life. He must frame your day and your imagination. As a good husband takes his wife as his compass, so too should God govern your reality—transcending all earthly loves and knowledges, making them finally human. I learn of love by loving my wife; I learn of God by loving Jesus. This is the way it works. This is the wisdom of the great sign betwixt Christ and his Church.

And it’s why we’re bidden by the Church to follow Jesus into the wilderness. In imitation, we are asked to deny ourselves, to sacrifice, to refuse the violence of this demonic world. We are invited to do these things because Christ is in the desert we enter. We want to learn of him in his suffering and death, so we may know him in his resurrection. We must marry ourselves to Jesus in order truly to experience the tragedy of his death and the joy of his rising. We can only come to this by knowing Jesus, and we can only know Jesus by loving him. And love is a full thing.

Probably more than anything else, the Lenten sermons of Saint Leo the Great, in the fifth century, exemplify the spiritual ideal of Lent and show how it’s possible to weave the threads of faith and works into a fabric of love.  “But when these days,” he said, “which are especially marked out for the mystery of human redemption and immediately precede the Paschal Feast, come around, we are bound to prepare ourselves more diligently with pious purification.”  For Leo, Lent was an opportunity for Christians to be restored to the likeness of God, so that we come “to the most holy of all feasts free from all turmoil” (Sermon 44.1, 3). For him, struggling for “pious purification” took the form of fasting, forgiving, and almsgiving. By these spiritual or corporeal works, we can draw nearer God, intimate in our imitation of him, so much so as to be agents of divine work ourselves (Sermon 43.4). When we dare to fast, to reduce ourselves as the Son of God emptied himself and also fasted in the desert; when we dare to forgive the innocent as well as the guilty just as God forgives us; when we dare to give out of our abundance and even our poverty; when we do all these things in prayer and out of dispassionate and Godlike love, then, as Leo said, God “sees his own love imaged forth in man” (Sermon 48.5). Lent is meant for a total conversion like this.

Lent means to shake your body and your mind. Fasting, forgiving, and almsgiving are meant to be felt physically as well as spiritually. It is meant to be a holistic experience because God became human. Our discipleship is meant to be more than intellectual. No love on earth is merely sentiment—that’s called hypocrisy. The Lenten discipline of the Church, when embraced with the light touch of a lover, will bring the warm Christian soul into the very presence of Christ. This is the way of salvation. As Augustine said, it is not sufficient that we were made rich in Egypt, that we learned all we could. We must also observe the Pasch and thereby share in the love and suffering of Jesus. We mustn’t just get our ideas right. We must go with Jesus to the suffering. As Thomas said, “Let us also go, that we may die with him” (Jn 11:16).

Thus, we have here something of a Lenten rule. In love and with prayer we should fast, forgive, and give to those in need. However, forgetful as we are, we must diligently keep our souls away from the ruts of dead pious mechanism. The line between healthy religious habit and rote emptiness is sometimes very thin. It is always good to ask why Christians embrace a rule of life. Often, we slip into the mistaken way of thinking that conceives a rule of life to be the same thing as a life of rules. A rule of life, in the Christian sense, is certainly not this. A rule of life is about patterning one’s life after the life of Christ. Paul encouraged the Philippians to have the “mind of Christ,” to think about whatever is true, honorable, just, pure, lovely, gracious, excellent, and worthy of praise (Phil 2:5, 4:8). In order to think of these things, we must turn away from other things. We must spend time, learn, sacrifice for, and enjoy the God we love—all because he loves us. As with human loves, our love for God begs for our devotion, and true devotion shows itself in deeds. As James said, “faith by itself, if it has no works, is dead” (Jam 2:14).

But a rule of life is not just about being genuine. It’s also about salvation and knowledge. Through the personal habit that follows upon living according to a rule of life, the soul is brought into a more intimate relationship and communion with God. Saint Maximus the Confessor, similar to Leo, described the purpose and hope of this Lenten Rule perhaps the best. “Almsgiving heals the irascible part of the soul; fasting extinguishes the concupiscible part, and prayer purifies the mind and prepares it for the contemplation of reality.” Only then, Maximus said later on, is the mind “freed from the passions” and therefore able to journey “straight ahead to the contemplation of created things and…to the knowledge of the Holy Trinity” (Four Centuries on Charity 79, 86). We wonder how love and knowledge fit together. Here, we see how. In following Christ, in following his loving and cruciform ways, we come to see how he is indeed the wisdom and power of God (1 Cor 1:24). We see how our Lenten sacrifices share in the evangelization of the world: by our imitation of Christ, the “manifold wisdom of God” is more clearly presented to the world (Eph 3:10). Thus, our practice of Lent, we discover, takes on a greater significance than simply personal growth. It embraces the whole meaning of the Church’s mission. Which is the astounding mystery of it all, that he would work our salvation into the redemption of all.