Tag Archives: Lent

He has need of us

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This Palm Sunday, praying as a visitor in a packed to the gills new-to-me church, the familiar readings from Luke’s Gospel spoke to me in a new and powerful way.

From the Gospel read before the Palm Sunday Procession:

Jesus proceeded on his journey up to Jerusalem. As he drew near to Bethphage and Bethany at the place called the Mount of Olives, he sent two of his disciples. He said, “Go into the village opposite you, and as you enter it you will find a colt tethered on which no one has ever sat. Untie it and bring it here. And if anyone should ask you, ‘Why are you untying it?’ you will answer, ‘The Master has need of it.’

My friends, Jesus has need of US. He needs us to untie ourselves from thinking we have no power to make a positive difference in the world. He needs us to empower one another to make the way for God’s love to break into our weary world.

Because like Jesus, many innocents are being condemned by the group think of the crowds.

Pilate addressed them a third time, “What evil has this man done? I found him guilty of no capital crime. Therefore I shall have him flogged and then release him.”

With loud shouts, however, they persisted in calling for his crucifixion, and their voices prevailed. The verdict of Pilate was that their demand should be granted.

The crowds can condemn, and the crowds can also speak out and stand up for those wrongly accused. Those whose free speech rights are in peril. Those who are wrongfully deported and detained. Those whose life-saving medicine and food is stopped by greed and ideology. Those who …

Christ has need of us. Today. Now. Here in this day and time.

Will we like Peter deny Christ and His love?

Or will we help to carry the cross and seek to bring about God’s reign of justice and peace.

Choosing Life and Love

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In today’s first reading from Deuteronomy (30) we hear:

“Choose life, then, that you and your descendants may live, by loving the Lord, your God, heeding his voice, and holding fast to him. For that will mean life for you, a long life for you to live on the land that the Lord swore he would give to your fathers Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.”

I had started my morning prayer time reflecting on another reading, this one from Blessed Franz Jägerstätter, who I have chosen (or has chosen me) as my spiritual companion this Lent.

“When something difficult comes about, whoever remains in love will receive everything for the best.”

It seems to me that these two readings are linked. God is good all the time, yet we humans make life messy and sometimes difficult for ourselves and others with our choices.

It is good to remember, to quote a well-worn phrase from fictional character Anne with an e of Lucy M. Montgomery’s Green Gables, “Tomorrow is a new day with no mistakes in it.”

We can never undo what is done, but we can face today and the days ahead by holding fast to the truth of God’s love.

Holding fast … interestingly that phrase has come to mean more to me these days, as it is a definition of resistance.

I commit in these challenging times to hold fast to goodness, love, justice, human dignity, compassion, and mercy as I follow the God of Peace. I choose life. I choose to love always, fiercely, inclusively.

Franz Jägerstätter faced hard choices in a time of extreme social sin as he refused to fight for the Nazi regime. He held fast to his love for God, his family, and the people of God at great cost. In the end he was murdered by the Nazi government. In the end following the path to love did not lead to a long life for him on earth. His memory, indeed his very name, is blessed and his witness of a life of love lives on to inspire us today.

Pray for us Blessed Franz Jägerstätter, that we may hold fast to God’s love, that we may act in love and for love and with love. Always. Amen.

Light of the beloved

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On this second Sunday of Lent, we hear the words of God, coming through the clouds: “This is my Beloved Son; listen to Him.”

Transfiguration (Jesus MAFA, Cameroon)

Moses and Elijah were apparently there on the mountain, and Jesus had already been Transfigured, his clothes a dazzling white. Understandable then that this freaked Peter, James, and John out just a bit. Or, as Mark writes, terrified them, so much so that Peter  nervously started talking about building tents for the three. (Peter’s fumbling always makes me feel better.)

That is when the cloud appears and God’s voice can be heard. Seeing the light emanating from Jesus was not enough. So God made it clear for them (us). Jesus is his beloved. Listen to him. And then they saw him. Just him. Alone. With them. Their friend and rabbi who was also the beloved Son of God. They still didn’t quite get it, but they stayed with what it might mean.

Today in Rome Pope Francis reflected on this Gospel in his Angelus message.

“Here is the message: never divert your eyes from the light of Jesus. … This is what we Christians are called to do in the journey of life, always keep before our eyes the radiant face of Christ.”

What keeps us from seeing the light of Christ, ever present in our midst? What keeps us unable to BE the light of Christ for others? Can we echo Gos’s voice, reminding ourselves and others that we too are beloved children of God?

Pope Francis offered a tip for us all during these times, where shadows of darkness are also present and our woundedness, anxiety, and fear can prevent us from seeing the good also and always present in our midst if we but look for it:

“Here is a good resolution for Lent: cultivate open gazes, become ‘seekers of light,’ seekers of the light of Jesus, in prayer and in people.”

As I was praying with this Gospel and the Pope’s words this morning, I was reminded of a video prayer I made over a decade ago set to The Transfiguration by Sufjan Stevens.

Let us not be lost in the cloud, distracted by our fears.  May we look out for the light and be the light for others.

LENT: Wearing Love

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One word keeps coming to me in my prayer these first days of Lent in 2022: Love.

In our first reading today from Leviticus we hear the great commandment, “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.”

I have long wondered if the greatest crisis in our world today isn’t that we don’t realize how much we are, each of us, worthy of love. We are all God’s own beloved. God loved us into being. God calls us to love one another as God has loved us.

This morning I prayed with a booklet created several years ago by a group in my religious Congregation focused on growing in nonviolence. Each week the booklet explores Lent with the Principles of Nonviolence. The principle for the first week of Lent is: Nonviolence chooses love instead of hate.

Our founder Margaret Anna Cusack wrote in 1874: “Force was no longer to be the rule, except, indeed, the force of love.”

In 2020 Philadelphia singer songwriter Joy Ike released a song called “Wearing Love.” It is a song I return to again and again to reground myself on this journey. (It is also good to dance to.)

Slow your breathing
No more scheming
Quit competing
Just love 

And everyone will wonder
You did not go under
You were undercover
Wearing love 

 Keep your words
They won’t fix anything
All that works is the love that you bring

This Lent, and beyond, may I find my ground and center in God’s unconditional love. May I bring the force of that love into my actions and relationships. May I wear love always. Just love.

Thoughts and Action

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Prompt our actions with your inspiration, we pray, O Lord, and further them with your constant help, that all we do may always begin from you and by you be brought to completion.

The above words come from the collect for today’s liturgy on this Thursday after Ash Wednesday. As we begin this Lenten journey, there is so much in need of constant help.

The wars raging in Ukraine and so many other parts of the human family.

The cries of Earth as temperatures rise and our planet’s ecosystem struggles to keep up with harm caused by human activity.

The cries of people who are living in poverty or otherwise on the margins, wondering how they will provide just the basic necessities for their loved ones.

The divisions between and among us that deny human dignity and prevent us from treating each other as the beloved of God we are.

This is the context as we begin Lent. And we are called to begin the Lenten journey in our own hearts.

Purify my heart!
May every word, every thought!
Every motive, every intention!
Be pleasing in your sight O God!
Be pleasing in your sight O God!

This song by Jess Ray, based on Psalm 119, rings true of my heart’s desire for this Lenten journey.

May my heart, my every, word, every thought, every motive be pleasing to God. A high order, but all things are possible with, through, and for God.

In our CSJP Constitutions we say that prayer leads to action, while action leads us to pray. As we hold the many needs of our world crying out for help, may our heartfelt prayer lead us to actions for peace through justice.

Amen

First Friday of Lent

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My reflection for today, the First Friday of this Lenten season has been posted on Global Sisters Report.

The invitation for me this Lent, it seems, is to focus on beauty, to add to and look for and create and celebrate beauty amidst all the goo of life. I’ve been invited to focus on beauty in my work, in loving community, in the challenges and in the blessings. I do believe in the power of redemption, in the awesome continuing work of our creator God, in and through us and yes, even in the most messy bits, when beauty can be harder to see.

My Lenten intention, given to me as sheer grace, is to remember all of this these days and to be an engaged participant in the beauty that surrounds us.

We’ll see where this Lenten journey leads.

May you and I be graced with a beautiful Lent

Click here to read the whole reflection

Bring me back my heart – a Holy Saturday Reflection

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It’s Holy Saturday, a fitting time and space for prayer these days, when we often seem to find ourselves in the Holy Saturday moments of  our lives.  There’s so much suffering in the world,  yet even more there is so much love in the world (f we can just remember that!), and here we are called to live into the promise, in between the already but not yet.

This morning I found myself praying with Mary, friend of Jesus.  She had stayed with her dear one to the end, through the suffering that she was powerless to stop, even standing at the foot of the cross in witness to love and life. She was there as his body was laid in the tomb, and the stone rolled across its entrance.  The others departed then, but as Mathew’s Gospel tells us, she stayed there, unable to leave just yet.  Another friend kept her company as they sat together with their memories and grief and uncertainty.

“But Mary Magdalene and the other Mary remained sitting there, facing the tomb”

We too keep her company.  We face the tomb.  We love, we remember, and we live into the promise of Easter Sunday, even in our Holy Saturday moments.

And so I share with you this video prayer reflection, the fruit of my contemplation this Holy Saturday, as we await the Resurrection.  Peace.

 

Good Friday in a wounded world

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Somehow it is already Good Friday, with the promise of Easter just days away.

 Today we remember the power of love.

Love as modeled by Jesus is not rational, it is not self serving, it is not romantic, it is not saccharine or weak or pointless.

Because love is the point of it all. Love is the way to wholeness and healing and harmony and peace.

These of course are things our wounded world needs so deeply and dearly, even as in our name, some of our elected leaders threaten lifelines, tear open holes in our social safety net, drop death dealing super weapons and exploit our common home for short term profit.

And so this Good Friday I pray for wholeness and healing, for harmony and peace. For me and you and the entire human community.

Jesus, one with us, you who humbled yourself and suffered death on a cross, be with us in our cross carrying moments today. Inspire us to journey with one another, to remain at the foot of the cross, to bear witness and to create openings for hope even in the darkest of days. Teach us to love one another, always.

Holy Saturday Moments

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holy20saturdayLife is filled with many Holy Saturday moments. Time upon time we must let go of what was before we can even begin to be open to what will come.  I think of the way the first Holy Week after my own mother’s death was different than any other before or since. I felt it in my bones. I think of friends who have lost their job and struggled to find their feet again, or friends who have lost a child far too soon, or seen the end of their marriage.  There is always that messy middle space of witnessing the love lived and lost before something new emerges to call us forth to witness to love and life in new ways.

Theologian Shelly Rambo identifies Holy Saturday as the “middle day, as the site of witness to a more complex relationship between death and life” (Spirit and Trauma: A Theology of Remaining, pg. 46.). And what is at the core of this complex relationship? Love of course. “Between death and life, there is a testimony to Spirit, to a love that survives not in victory but in weariness” (pgs. 79-80).

This weariness is real and of the Spirit. It attests to the depth of love that has been lived. But it also can keep us from seeing the new life that is before our eyes. Think of Mary Magdalene at the tomb, mistaking Jesus for the gardener!

I can’t help but ponder the shifting landscape and transformations taking place in religious life through the lens of Holy Saturday. As I wrote in a Global Sisters Report column last year, “Middle space represents this time as an almost Holy Saturday moment. Much is breaking down, we know something new is emerging, but this is a moment pregnant with not yet.”

On this Holy Saturday morning, I found myself reading an article featuring some younger Catholic sisters I know who are members the Sisters of the Holy Redeemer. It is a great article that focuses on the new life that is present and emerging, even as the sisters are letting go of the structures of the past. “Now they are crafting a brave future in which the sisterhood may be minuscule, but its work will go on.”

We are indeed living in a Holy Saturday moment. “We can say, ‘Oh, isn’t it sad, our sisters are aging, nobody is coming, we’re dying out’ – and that’s real,” said Sister Anne Marie Haas, provincial supervisor of the community’s Montgomery County headquarters. “But we have a choice.”

And that choice is love, even in its weariest and messiest forms. As we say in our CSJP Constitutions, “Confident of God’s faithful love, and collaborating with others who work for justice and peace, we face the future with gratitude and hope.”

Lent – That’s What’s Happening

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73830c79eb33ab07b328d8a4bdb71f8d-650x422x1During my childhood in the 1970s & 80s, Saturday mornings were a special and almost sacred time, in large part because of Saturday morning cartoons and the bit I looked most forward to–Schoolhouse Rock.

For those who are not in the know, and I am always surprised when folks cannot sing the preamble to the Constitution or know that zero is my hero, Schoolhouse Rock was a series of catchy songs set to animated cartoons. The series helped a generation of children understand complicated concepts such as how a bill becomes a law, the values of immigration for society, or the function of a conjunction in a sentence. Music is a great way to learn, and there have been many times in my adult life when I have returned to what I learned via song and cartoon  all those decades ago on Saturday morning.

This Lent, for example, I’ve been playing around in my head and heart with some of what I learned from Schoolhouse Rock about grammar.

Think about it … Lent itself is a funny word.  The online Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines Lent as the “40 weekdays from Ash Wednesday to Easter observed by the Roman Catholic, Eastern, and some Protestant churches as a period of penitence and fasting,” with the origin coming from the Middle English word for springtime. Living on the East Coast as I am these days, where there is still frost in the mornings and the possibility of snow, it is easy to understand why this season of anticipation took its name from the hope for spring!

Of course, the word lent has other meanings as well.  In French the letters l-e-n-t  become and an adjective meaning slow, which is entirely appropriate for the Lenten Season. Adjectives, as the “Unpack Your Adjectives” Schoolhouse rock video taught me as a child, “are words you use to really describe things, handy words to carry around.”

I carry lots of things around these days, mainly a growing list of urgent things that need to be done. Yet the wisdom of the Lenten season is that, as a church, we set aside a time each year which carries with it the higher priorities of slowing down through prayer, fasting, and almsgiving. The French adjective lent is a good word to carry around in my heart as I slow down during these 40 days.

Lent also has other meanings in English. For example, it can be the past simple tense or past participle of the irregular verb to lend. Verbs, as the Schoolhouse Rock video “Verb, That’s What’s Happenin’” reminds me, put “my heart in action … to work, to live, to play, to love.”   This is both a lovely and very challenging concept, especially when I consider the ways my heart is lent in action.

Who puts my heart into action? Who am I lent by?  Where do I lend my energy?

Lent, that’s what’s happening.