Lent is a time of spiritual renewal through prayer and penance. We’re now halfway across the year, making our way through summer. It’s time for a refresh, time to take up the weapons of our great spiritual battle. It’s time for St. Michael’s Lent.
St. Michael serves as the guardian angel of the Church, the one who expelled Lucifer from heaven and protected the people of Israel throughout the Old Testament. To honor his role as our protector, a practice arose in the Middle Ages of imitating his angelic purity and power through forty days of prayer and asceticism, running from August 15th, the great feast of the Assumption, through the feast of Michaelmas Day, September 29th. St. Michael’s Lent has become an anchor within Exodus’s year, complementing our ninety-day Exodus from Egypt with these forty days of spiritual combat against our hidden enemies.
Healing forms an essential part of spiritual warfare. Our sins and broken relationships wound us, and the devil prods these points as openings for his temptations and attacks. God helps us to resist these assaults through the ministry of his holy angels. He is the source of life, and he draws us out of the darkness and brokenness of sin and disorder. Jesus brings us to true healing and freedom through his grace, restoring us from within and helping us to repair relationships around us.
The Book of Tobit offers us a perfect model of both spiritual warfare and healing. It highlights another holy archangel, St. Raphael, whom we also celebrate on September 29th. During St. Michael’s Lent this year, we will follow the archangel as he guides Tobit’s son, Tobias, to his future bride. They must rescue her from the oppression of a demon, who has killed her previous husbands, and, as they return home, bring Tobit to healing from his blindness.
St. Michael’s Lent will invite you to enter into your own journey of healing. In addition to daily reflections on the beautiful book of Tobit, it will offer a fictional series, “Heal Me, I’m Broken,” about an Exodus man finding restoration in his family with the help of his neighbor, a combat veteran. We will also receive guidance from an exorcist, Fr. Carlos Martins, co-host of the renowned podcast, The Exorcist Files. You will have a chance to submit questions to him about the spiritual life, resisting temptation, exorcisms, and healing, among other topics.
The key to success for this “Summer Lent” remains prayer, asceticism, and fraternity. We will root St. Michael’s Lent in prayer, coming alongside God’s angelic throne through thirty minutes of daily prayer, a weekly holy hour, and one hour-long night vigil a week. We will continue to build strong fraternity, because even the angels stand in their nine choirs, supporting one another in their love and service of God. In order to attune ourselves to spiritual realities, we will pull back from social media and the news, while seeking order through a consistent wake-up time and a full night’s sleep. The angels put God before all else, and to imitate them, we will observe Wednesdays and Fridays as days of sacrifice and penance, with fasting, abstinence from meat, and a cold shower.
Starting August 15th, we will strive to imitate St. Michael, who, through the power of God, cast the devil out of his presence. Through the guidance of St. Raphael, we seek the healing and freedom that only God can give. We will do our part to step back from our attachments while turning to the power of God. He will free us from the power of the devil so that we can embrace our true identity as free sons of the Father.
