Today, Thursday in the Third Week of Lent, is the happy mid-point of our Lenten observance. For those of us who are observing the time-honored custom of fasting, today is the 20th day of the Great Fast. We have 20 more days to persevere in penance to prepare ourselves for Holy Easter.
Have you grown lax? Have you not made as much spiritual progress as you hoped? Have you not done enough fasting, enough abstinence, enough penance, enough spiritual reading, enough extra praying, enough extra Masses, or enough almsgiving?
There is no reason to fret if you have grown lax. Now is the time for us to renew our vigor and march forward to Easter with greater resolve to make reparation for sins.
The Mozarabic Liturgy offers for us this day a beautiful exhortation that Dom Gueranger in his "Liturgical Year," shares in the Volume on Lent, Page 290:
Looking forward, dearly beloved brethren, to the hope of the Passion and Resurrection of the Son of God, as also to the manifestation of the glory of our blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ: resume your strength and courage. Be not daunted by the labour you have to go through, but remember the solemnity of the holy Pasch, for which you are so ardently longing. One half of holy Lent is over: you have gone through the difficulties of the past, why should you not be courageous about the future fast? Jesus who deigned to suffer fatigue for our sake, will give strength to them that are fatigued. He that granted us to begin the past, will enable us to complete the future. Children! He will be with us to assist us, who wishes us to hope for the glory of His Passion. Amen.
Dom Gueranger also notes the following regarding today's mid-Lent point in the Roman Rite:
This day brings us to the middle of Lent, and is called mid-Lent Thursday. It is the twentieth of the forty fasts imposed upon us, at this holy season, by the Church. The Greeks call the Wednesday of this week Mesonestios, that is, the mid-fast. They give this name to the entire week, which, in their liturgy, is the fourth of the seven that form their Lent. But the Wednesday is, with them, a solemn feast, and a day of rejoicing, whereby they animate themselves to courage during the rest of the season. The Catholic nations of the west, though they do not look on this day as a feast, have always kept it with some degree of festivity and joy. The Church of Rome has countenanced the custom by her own observance of it; but, in order not to give a pretext to dissipation, which might interfere with the spirit of fasting, she postpones to the following Sunday the formal expression of this innocent joy, as we shall see further on. Yet, it is not against the spirit of the Church that this mid-day of Lent should be marked by some demonstration of gladness; for example, by sending invitations to friends, as our Catholic forefathers used to do; and serving up to table choicer and more abundant food than on other days of Lent, taking care, however, that the laws of the Church are strictly observed. But alas! how many even of those calling themselves Catholics have been breaking, for the past twenty days, these laws of abstinence and fasting! Whether the dispensations they trust to be lawfully or unlawfully obtained, the joy of mid-Lent Thursday scarcely seems made for them. To experience this joy, one must have earned and merited it, by penance, by privations, by bodily mortifications; which is just what so many, nowadays, cannot think of doing. Let us pray for them, that God would enlighten them, and enable them to see what they are bound to do, consistently with the faith they profess.
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