Open Wide the Doors — Lent
Saint John Paul II is a great inspiration to me, as he is to many others. During his first homily as pope he proclaimed to the Church,“Open wide the doors to Christ.” This is a rich image of redemption, of the interior life, and of our healing. Together, let us expound upon this image of the “doors of our heart” for a brief series: one for Lent, Easter, and Pentecost.
Let’s begin with Lent.
And before that, let’s begin with our beginning.
We are born into this world with hearts wide open. We are only aware of the safety of our mother’s womb, of her tenderness, and that of others who care for us in one capacity or another after our birth. Life is safe; I can keep the doors of my heart open. I can let people come close.
But maybe, at some point, mom or dad raised their voice and scared us. Maybe we experienced injustice with no one coming through for us and making things right. Maybe we were physically hurt, or we experienced some serious trauma. Maybe even in the womb our heart intuited we were not completely wanted.
Regardless of what the specifics may have been for each of us, our sense of safety in this world was betrayed, and we did not know how to make sense of the pain. With the onset of suffering, the doors of our heart that were once wide open were suddenly slammed shut.
The control we can feel in that closed posture of self-protection helps to keep the pain at bay, but it also keeps love at bay. Love is what we were made for, but in a fallen world, love is a risk. As C.S. Lewis wrote in his book The Four Loves:
“To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one.”
The connotation of “intact” that Lewis refers to here is the intact quality that the molecules of a diamond form, rigidly compressed against one another, or that which a coffin lid forms resting snugly atop a casket. Intact, in this sense, means only hardness or decay–something far from, even alien to, the tender liveliness of little children and their unguarded joy.
The Lord gave few commands in the New Testament, but one was that we are to become like little children if we wish to enter into the Kingdom of Heaven (Mt. 18:3). To become little like a child means possessing a tender heart, a vulnerable heart, a heart capable of living with open doors so as to live the love of Heaven.
This command means that learning to open the doors of our heart to Christ is not merely an elective task that some of us may choose to undergo as “extra credit” while on earth; it is the only practical evidence we can give of our profession of faith in Jesus.
Thus, it is imperative that we look at this in our lives as the litmus test for whether or not we are truly allowing Jesus to save us. We are not saved at a distance. We are saved when we let Jesus come close.
At the closed doors of each and every part of our heart, we must choose to receive the gift of salvation, or not. Here, we are faced with a decision. We must decide at each and every place whether we want to:
1. open the doors back up to Jesus, with His help, which can mean having to face the pain that caused us to close them. Or,
2. keep the doors of our heart closed, and decide instead to turn to ourselves to try and find a way to provide for our various needs amidst our self-imposed siege.
The former option is the process of healing and redemption. We will discuss this further at Easter.
The latter option, practically speaking, is called Sin.
Sin is our attempt to meet our needs apart from God, to make life behind locked doors work.
Again, this is all in an effort to stave off some type of pain; so, we seal off the doors, bar the gates, and pile what we can in front of them. When we choose sin, our fleshy, open, childlike hearts begin to transform into fortresses prepared for battle. We brace for impact and customize our defenses according to what we are deprived of, according to the type of sin we employ to meet those needs. Here, we must save ourselves, and we must not let anyone get too close.
Here are some images of how the seven deadly sins might corrupt our doors:
When sin looks like pride and vainglory, we adorn our doors with all kinds of virtue, or an elaborate synthesis of beauty, knowledge, power, or respectability. All of this decor is defended quite nicely by our sound self-evaluation and sense of self-righteousness or superiority. The reality is that we live in shame behind this persona of perfection, and we fear ever being seen in these places we have deemed unacceptable. So the bells and whistles serve to shame others, but not overtly of course, not enough for them to know we want them to feel less than us. These devices pose just enough of a barrier to keep others at bay so that we feel safer behind these closed doors. But we are also ‘safe’ from seeing the Lord look upon us in our shame, inviting us to open to Him.
When sin looks like wrath, we build turrets upon our doors and employ mercenaries to house them, ready to attack anyone who may get too close, who may threaten our locked doors. Even more, if we are really willing to be honest, we attack anyone who may see through our façade for what is really going on, who may see us as afraid or powerless and our defenses unwarranted. They ‘threaten’ us with the truth that we are in fact safe to open our doors, and, with their meekness, invite us to call off the attacks. But in our anger, all we see is an enemy, an enemy unwilling or unable to fight for us–Jesus included. So we either take Him out too, or just ignore Him in order to regain control. Each choice against meekness and towards wrath is another isolating attempt that makes it more difficult to let another draw near.
Isolation and loneliness can make lust quite appealing. Here, we carve out secret doors and come out in hiding. We hoard up all we need in further locked rooms within, trying to endure the famine of relationship. Instead of facing the loneliness inside and talking to Jesus about it, we succumb to the hopelessness we feel about ever finding a fulfilling love. We deem God inadequate and begin to search for a substitute, someone willing to pretend to be Him for us. Sometimes we just outright kill the part of ourselves that needs relationship; we make our doors a rubble heap. Here at these doors, we bring someone close by controlling them, or we erase that possibility completely.
The sin of gluttony builds pantry shelves along the inside of the doors, allowing us to feed on palatable pleasures that distract us from our pain. This leads to confusion and steals from us our longing for more, our hunger for the Lord–the longing that occasions relationship with Him. The numbing of these desires may last for a time, but in our confusion and persistent ache, they inevitably resurface, and we turn to other things in an attempt to fill the void.
Greed is a sin that can also specialize in “void-filling.” Here, we tell ourselves we need more things to come close. They will save us. All that we accumulate, or desire to accumulate, is like adding locks and complex accoutrements to our doors. The longer they remain in place, the more attached to them we become, until eventually these things take such root in us and seemingly become a part of us. If we ever want to open back up to the Lord and rest in secure attachment to Him, each unhealthy attachment is something we will have to let go of, another lock we will have to finagle free. The more we have allowed something to become part of us, the more we can feel like we are dying when we allow an attachment to wither within us. We can dread the work and effort required to “unlock” these things, and, because of all of this, any movement toward the Lord can come to feel like a taxing burden. The greater our attachments, the greater our burden will be.
The sin of sloth often kicks in here, when we feel burdened. Sloth can look like an endless spa day, where rest and relaxation take precedence over everything, or it can look like a perpetual construction zone in front of our doors. Our busyness appears important. We tell ourselves we are working on important things, maybe even on something for the Lord. Yet the project never comes to an end, or, if it does, we inevitably find some other ‘busywork’ to excuse us from simply sitting in the open doorway with the Lord.
Last but not least, the sin of envy looks upon the mess we have made with our doors, incessantly dissatisfied with their state. We fail to understand or appreciate the unique goodness of God we exemplify, and our unique capacity for relationship with Him and with others. In large part, this is due to the way our sinfulness has distorted our doors, and thus our present perception of ourselves. We look out from atop these doors unto the doors of others we see “far away”—never revealing to them just how much we have brought their image inside. We look on with narcissistic resentment and telescopic insecurity–dreaming of ways to make what is theirs mine. Meanwhile, we miss the Lord’s loving and affirming gaze right in front of our doors, a gaze that requires no looking glass to behold.
At the end of the day, we need the security of doors. In a fallen world, people are going to hurt us, and we need to be able to close our doors when our dignity is threatened. However, in our exhaustion from dealing with sinful humanity day in and day out, we inevitably give the infinitely loving God the same “door treatment.” We perceive in Him the same threats we prepare for in others; maybe not consciously, but still enough for us to justify our defenses against Him. Hence, we keep Him, who is our salvation, at a distance.
Thus the need for Lent!
Lent encourages us to honestly examine what we have built up, piled up, and allowed to fester around the doors of our hearts—everything we employ to keep God from coming close. It is an essential endeavor, and it is why the Church, in her wisdom, gives us this entire season to prepare for Easter. For in order for Easter to have its effect, we must allow Jesus access to every place that we have blocked off. We must roll away the stones that keep our doors closed so that the Crucified Christ can enter. If we do not allow Him to enter behind these doors, into these rooms-become-tombs of our hearts, we cannot expect them to be transformed by the power of His Resurrection.
It can be a scary thing to look honestly at these gates of sin and their decaying cavities within. The longer these doors have remained locked, deprived of the life-giving relationship with God that we have needed, the more these closed-off rooms in our hearts have begun to look tomb-like. Our sense of shame in these places makes us hesitate to change, to begin this process of preparing a way for the Lord, to let Him come close. Amidst our fears of sincerely beginning to crack open these doors to Christ, we must remember who it is to whom we are speaking about opening them.
This is Jesus, the man who chose to be born homeless so that those without a home may never have to live that experience alone. This is the man who went out into the desert and fasted for forty days and forty nights, pushing himself to the brink of starvation so that those who are hungry do not have to endure that alone. Jesus, the one who silenced the stone-throwers; the man who with loving gaze raised up the shame-faced woman when her sinful doors were torn open and exposed, restoring her dignity at her doors, and within them.
Jesus cares not about how strong the stench is or how long Lazarus has been dead. He is coming to open the door to your tomb and call you out of it, to bring life to everything that has died, to bring hope to the dreams you have forgotten.
He will not fight back against your turrets. He will not be tricked or confuse your adorned doors for the real you, nor will he start upon invitation into your hidden rooms. He already sees you, all of you. He loves every part of you, and there is nothing you can do to change that. He comes with one purpose, not to condemn, but to save, and He is serious about it. Here is one who is trustworthy, one to whom we can open our doors.
This is what Lent is about: with Jesus, doing what we must to open again, wide, the doors to Christ. This gives purpose and focus to our fasting, penance, and prayer. This is a task we cannot do without His help, so let us ask Him for the grace we need to face each one of our deadly doors, knowing that He will not ask us to go there alone. He will come to these sealed-off places with only a mission to love us into letting go. His method is patience, not prying, blessing, not blame. He is Emmanuel, “God with us,” God come close. His entire mission is to give us what we need so that we can open our hearts back up to love. And as He said to Ezekiel repeatedly, so He says to us here and now:
“I have promised, and I will do it.”
