Getting to the Point: Lent

Showing posts with label Lent. Show all posts

Sunday, February 14, 2016

This Week in Madonna House - February 7-13

While I'm suspending the blog during the week for Lent, in a spirit of increased silence and prayer, I will be blogging on Sundays, when our Lenten observances are mitigated. I know that the consistently most popular feature on this blog has been the 'This Week in MH' column, and so I am happy to oblige.

Mind you, I have been away from MH so very much in recent weeks that I am hard pressed to tell you exactly what is going on here. My trip to Regina was immediately succeeded by a weekend retreat for women in Ottawa. Upon getting back to Combermere I have been confronted by such a backlog of appointments and other work that I have barely noticed what anyone else is doing, to be frank! I been a busy busy little boy, in short.

That being said, our week in MH started with pizza, pancakes, football and yuks and ended with ashes and fasting. Yes, it was the great shift into Lent. We have our own little MH version of Mardi Gras, which happened to coincide with Super Bowl Sunday. So we had the annual Pre-Lent Event--a night for everyone to show off their comedy chops with skits, songs, and assorted silliness. I wasn't here for it this year (see above, retreat), but from all accounts it was quite droll.

One of the highlights was a skit involving the three magi trying to get across the Canada-US border and running into all sorts of bureaucratic snags (do you have the right form to bring precious metals into the country? Plant matter?), until their guardian angel appeared and miraculously stamped their passports. This was all deeply amusing to us, as we have had... well, quite a year of difficulties around immigration and border crossings.

The next day was Super Bowl Sunday, and we do have a good number of avid fans in the community. Since it was also the Sunday before Lent, the kitchen went all out and made a delicious pizza supper with home made soda pop, all of which lent itself to a buffet style service, so those who wanted to could watch the game, those who couldn't care less about it could just enjoy the good food. And... yay, Broncos!

Shrove Tuesday was just around the corner, so of course our little Mardi Gras was not quite over, as we enjoyed (and I do mean enjoyed!) the traditional pancake supper for that day.

All of the above shifted tone and content dramatically the next day when we began Lent with an early morning Mass and the distibution of ashes on the forehead. 'The Lenten Spring has come, the time of repentance. O brothers, let us cleanse ourselves from all evil, crying out to the Giver of Life, 'Glory to Thee, O Lover of Man!' This hymn rang out as we began the Church's annual season of repentance and mercy, fasting and prayer and journeying towards the beauty of Easter.

We have no special communal fasting during Lent itself--it is left to the individual and what he or she can do. After all, we have young men doing heavy manual labor in the bush, along with not-so-young members doing much less physically arduous work. We keep serving the same type and amount of food, in other words, and people can figure out themselves what they need to do.

A key Lenten element here is the hymn we sing at Lauds every morning--'Open to Me the Doors of Repentance', which lays out the simple, sad reality of our sinfulness in no uncertain terms ("When I think of the many evil things I have done, wretch that I am, I tremble at the fearful day of judgment"), but always with an immediate turn to the mercy of God ("Like David, I cry to thee, have mercy on me O God, according to your great mercy!").

At the end of Lauds we pray the great Lenten Prayer of St. Ephrem the Syrian. I wrote a whole commentary about it two years ago. It is a great invitation to ongoing humility, reflection, and especially non-judgmental love of one another.

So that is the liturgical scene. In our work life, this week was the annual floor oiling in the dining room. This is the proper care and feeding of the hardwood floor in our main house dining room. It needs a coat of oil each year to protect it from the wear and tear of many, many feet. The carpenters do it in stages so that we can continue to use the dining room during the process, which takes about four days all together, blocking off one half of the room and having us eat in the other half, and then the reverse. It is all a little cramped and cozy--a good chance for us to practice mutual consideration and kindness as we all squeeze in a bit close.

The other major work reality is that, like most of Eastern North America, we are in the grip of severe cold right now. It was - 40 C this morning , according to the thermometer, and that is not counting the wind chill. This kind of weather up in this wilderness requires attentiveness and care about wood fires and the like, and serious care about even going outside for any length of time. This level of coldness can lead to frostbite very quickly indeed.

What else? The men are working (severe cold notwithstanding) in the bush, cutting down trees for fire wood. The MH staff are having their Friday afternoon study groups. This is something we do at this time of year when, at least for most of the community, it is a somewhat quieter season -- take some time during the week to study something or other for personal enrichment. People are doing a wide variety of things this year--everything from folk dancing to knitting to the intersection of science and theology to Pope Francis' writings on mercy to a Catholic understanding of gender issues. We are a really diverse community, and the interests are always quite varied.

As I always say at about this point in this column, I know there's a whole lot more going on, but that's all I can think of. Being away as I have been and taken up with catching up as I have been (unlike most of the community, this is NOT my quieter time of year), this is even more so than usual. Be assured that in the midst of all of it we are praying for all of you and for the world, and striving to offer our lives in service and prayer for and through it all.

Tuesday, February 9, 2016

Shrove Tuesday

So, what are you giving up for Lent? It starts tomorrow, eh? It is the season for making room, either in your tummy so that God can fill you with Himself without all the richness of the earth filling it, or in your mind by clearing it away of distractions and clutter--so much of that in all of our lives, right?

I am giving up... well, this blog. Just for Lent, as far as I know! It's not that blogging is some terrible thing in my life or is causing me great problems spiritually. I enjoy the blog and have settled into a fairly manageable rhythm with it.

It is just that my real Lenten need this year is a simple one: I need more silence in my life. I know that people have an sort of funny picture of MH that it is a kind of lay monastery where all we do is pray in grand silence all day. It is not... quite like that, really.

My life is a busy one, full of people and obligations each day. I wouldn't have it any other way, and am quite content and peaceful in my vocation. But... I have been feeling the need for more silence, quite acutely, lately. And the simple truth is, the only place in my life I can put more silence in is the place currently taken up with blogging.

I will still blog on Sunday with the weekly round-up of life in MH. Sunday is not 'Lent' in the penitential sense of the word. And I will indeed (as far as I know...) be back at Easter time, continuing with all the series that I am (I admit) kind of abandoning in mid-stream right now.

Be assured of my prayers for you all (my blog and book readers are on my prayer list), and know especially that I pray you all have a Lent that is truly spiritually renewing and enriching. God bless you, and talk to you in April!

Tuesday, March 3, 2015

A Question of Love

Arise — go! Sell all you possess. Give it directly, personally to the poor. Take up My cross (their cross) and follow Me, going to the poor, being poor, being one with them, one with Me.

Little — be always little! Be simple, poor, childlike.

Preach the Gospel with your life — without compromise! Listen to the Spirit. He will lead you.

Do little things exceedingly well for love of Me.

Love... love... love, never counting the cost.

Go into the marketplace and stay with Me. Pray, fast. Pray always, fast.

Be hidden. Be a light to your neighbour’s feet. Go without fear into the depth of men’s hearts. I shall be with you.

Pray always. I will be your rest.

The Little Mandate of Madonna House

Take up My cross (their cross) and follow Me. We are going through the Little Mandate of MH each Tuesday on the blog, phrase by phrase. These are words that Catherine received, we believe from God, in the 1930s when she was discerning His call in her life. They are the heart of our spirituality, what we try to live and believe we are called to be and do in the world.

Here we have, appropriately for Lent, the call to take up the Cross and follow Christ. Catherine was initially disconcerted by this as it is different from what is in the Scriptures. Christ calls us to take up our cross and follow Him—the personal share of suffering or struggle we bear both as human beings living in a fallen world and as men and women striving to live the Gospel of love in that world.

Here, though, it is His cross, and the cross of the poor, that we are being asked to carry. Perhaps these are not greatly different things in lived reality, but there is a focus here in the Mandate that is worth pondering.

We are called to bear not only our own sufferings, but those of the suffering humanity. We are not meant to be defined by our own joys and sorrows, problems and challenges and gifts, but to always be broken open to the other, to the poor one before us, to the sorrows of humanity, be it the suffering people of Syria or Ukraine, or the neighbour down the street.

We are to carry their cross as well as our own, Simon of Cyrene-like in the world. And in that we find ourselves carrying the Cross of Jesus Christ as well—His own offering of Himself for the world and all humanity. Without doubt we carry the tiniest sliver of this weight; He alone, being God, carries the whole of it.

We think, perhaps understandably, of this whole cross-carrying business as a heavy, burdensome, sad, frightening thing. There is no question about the heaviness of it. And fear—well, we’re only human, and to fear suffering is not exactly something that needs an explanation. But it is not a sad reality—that is where the difference comes in.

Taking up ‘My cross (their cross)’ is not, fundamentally, a question of suffering first. It is a question of loving, not suffering. And love, while it is a heavy burden, is not a sad thing. What makes our lives sad is not the suffering we bear in them because of our love; our lives our made sad by selfishness, not love.

It is closing our hearts to others and (in that) to God that extinguishes the light within us and makes us grim functionaries or tragic failures. This is the secret of the cross, and it is impossible to communicate it in words alone. It has to be known experientially, and even then its secret is communicated in great hiddenness and silence.

‘The secret of the Cross is joy,’ Catherine wrote. And it is the joy of being a great lover—lover of God and lover of humanity. And this is what is at the heart of the Little Mandate—the heart of the Gospel, too. “I have come that my joy may be in you, and your joy be made complete.” (John 15: 11)

Monday, February 23, 2015

What Are You Hungry For?

The Lord is my light and my salvation; whom shall I fear?

The Lord is the stronghold of my life; of whom shall I be afraid?

When evildoers assail me to eat up my flesh,

my adversaries and foes, it is they who stumble and fall.

Though an army encamp against me, my heart shall not fear;

though war arise against me, yet I will be confident.

One thing have I asked of the Lord, that will I seek after:

that I may dwell in the house of the Lord all the days of my life,

to gaze upon the beauty of the Lord and to inquire in his temple.

For he will hide me in his shelter in the day of trouble;

he will conceal me under the cover of his tent; he will lift me high upon a rock.

And now my head shall be lifted up above my enemies all around me,

and I will offer in his tent sacrifices with shouts of joy;

I will sing and make melody to the Lord.

Hear, O Lord, when I cry aloud; be gracious to me and answer me!

You have said, “Seek my face.”

My heart says to you, “Your face, Lord, do I seek.”

Hide not your face from me.

Turn not your servant away in anger, O you who have been my help.

Cast me not off; forsake me not, O God of my salvation!

For my father and my mother have forsaken me, but the Lord will take me in.

Teach me your way, O Lord, and lead me on a level path

because of my enemies.

Give me not up to the will of my adversaries; for false witnesses have risen against me,

and they breathe out violence.

I believe that I shall look upon the goodness of the Lord in the land of the living!

Wait for the Lord; be strong, and let your heart take courage;

wait for the Lord.

Psalm 27

Reflection – The Monday Psalter delivers up to us today one of the most lyrically beautiful psalms in the entire canon. Psalm 27, that wonderful meditation on the beauty of God, His beautiful Face, and the longing of the human heart to behold that face, to gaze upon that beauty, to live in the house of the Lord.

I believe that one of the great tragedies of humanity in general, but even more acutely of humanity in our times, is that the previous sentence would be a meaningless jumble of words, or a banal pious waffle, to a large percentage of people. We do, indeed, desire to gaze upon the beauty of God… but we don’t know that’s what we desire. What are we hungry for when we don’t know what we’re hungry for? God, that’s what. Or, rather, who.

And so we plunge into creatures, looking for that which awaits us in God. We thrash around with sex and money and possessions, thrills and distractions and diversions, never quite finding what we want, because what we want is none of these things exactly, but is only to be found in the goodness of the Lord in the land of the living.

All of these phrases meant one thing to the psalmist when he wrote them—God would preserve his life, and he would be able to go to Jerusalem and the temple there. Gazing upon God meant gazing upon the sanctuary of the temple.

But of course he was writing under the Spirit’s inspiration, and so the words have a life in them which has grown, like yeast in bread, to expand to utterly new meanings. The land of the living is indeed heaven; God has a human face, now, the beholding of which should be the consuming passion of our lives, the longing that keeps us pointed God-ward and heaven-ward, that enables us to radically choose to forego any created good for its sake.

This is a good Lenten psalm, really. Lent is not just a heavy time to berate ourselves for our sins and failures. In fact, that’s not really the point of it at all. It is a time to stir up in ourselves a desire for the All-Desirable One, a longing for the All-Beautiful One. And this psalm, itself so beautifully written, so evocative of that desire for God, is a good prayer for us as we embark on these early days of the Lenten journey. So let’s pray it in that spirit.

Saturday, February 21, 2015

This Week in Madonna House - February 14-20

This week in Madonna House was anything but uneventful—indeed, it will be a challenge for me to remember everything about it. For the first thing, I have been mentioning regularly in this column that we have had a dearth of guests with us since after Christmas. Well, forget about that—the dorms are filling up with a mix of short and long term guests. I’m not sure if people consciously think ‘What will I do for Lent? Oh, I know – I’ll go to MH!’ But that is in fact the normal pattern each year… and it is indeed a pretty good place to spend part if not all of Lent.

Last weekend was our MH version of Mardi Gras, which happened to coincide with the celebration of Harlem Foundation Day—the second phase of our apostolate when Catherine pioneered in the civil rights movement in the States. So we had lovely displays of all that, and a simple presentation of her work in that field.

That very day, though, we went in the pre-Lenten festivity mode. A home-made pizza supper brought delight to our palates, and then a home-made variety hour, with a strong element of comedy, brought delight to the rest of us. This is our annual ‘Pre-Lent Event’, which inevitably and invariably gets referred to colloquially if somewhat irreverently as the ‘Ash Bash’.

I missed it this year, being away at that vocation fair I mentioned last week, but people appreciated in particularly a certain priest of ours of Irish extraction, advanced in years but young in spirit, who lip-synched with high drama and panache to the three tenors recording of the Irish folk ballad Purple Heather (that’s the one with the ‘will ye go, lassy go?’ bit). This is always a great evening of fun and family, homemade entertainment for a community known for making everything by hand, anyway.

The traditional pancake supper on Tuesday ended our pre-Lenten blowout, and so we all gathered bright and early on Ash Wednesday for Mass and ashes. We don’t exactly do much communally in Lent that is different from the rest of the year—there is far too much variance in age, health, physical activity, spiritual maturity to have a communal program of fasting or penance.

We do have as our Lauds hymn each morning the great Byzantine hymn Open to Me the Doors of Repentance, which lays out in graphic strong language our profound sense of sin, and more profound sense of God’s mercy. And Lauds each morning ends with the Prayer of St. Ephrem the Syrian, about which I may blog this Lent at some point. Particularly salient in that prayer is the call to ‘be aware of my sins and not judge my brother.’

For spiritual reading we are doing one of our standbys – Great Lent by Alexander Schmemann, which has some of the best teachings on the fundamental Lenten attitudes and practices that I have ever encountered. His chapter on fasting is alone worth the price of the book.

Meanwhile, while Lent feels like an interminable season of 40 weeks, not days, it is in fact short enough, and so the Easter preparations have already begun. The Easter sweet bread koolitch, and the special Easter confection paska, both given to us by our Russian foundress, are being made, pysanky is being done in every corner of the house (that’s the elaborately dyed Ukrainian Easter eggs), the paschal candle is being carved and painted (yes, we make our own here).

All of which is happening as winter continues to bite deep. We haven’t had the huge snowfalls that Eastern Canada and the US have had, but we sure have had the severe cold. One of our favourite hymns here is ‘The Lenten Spring has come’ – it’s been hard not to sing it a bit ironically so far, as the wind howls and the mercury plunges low each night.

And of course all this is happening while cold winds and stormy weather beset our world in other ways too—we are conscious in this Lenten season of the great battle of good and evil, dark and light that marks our times. We believe our little lives here—pizza and frolic, repentance and prayer, ora et labora, are the best response we can make to hatred and violence, and we unite with all of you in praying for the world and offering our lives for the healing of the nations, in and with Jesus Christ who made that offering for all of us.

And that’s what happened in MH this week.

Wednesday, February 18, 2015

Ash Wednesday

Today is Ash Wednesday, of course, and the beginning of Lent. Happy Lent to you all, and may it help us all grow closer to the Lord, to repent of our sins, and to renew and deepen our baptismal commitment.

It seems appropriate on this day of sober self-reflection to continue the Wednesday series I’ve engaged in, reflecting on the pope’s examination of conscience to the Roman curia and applying it to our own lives. We have come to the seventh of fifteen spiritual ailments, and this one is:

The disease of rivalry and vainglory. When appearances, the colour of our clothes and our titles of honour become the primary object in life, we forget the words of Saint Paul: “Do nothing from selfishness or conceit but in humility count others better than yourselves. Let each of you look not only to his own interests, but also to the interests of others” (Phil 2:3-4). This is a disease which leads us to be men and woman of deceit, and to live a false “mysticism” and a false “quietism”. Saint Paul himself defines such persons as “enemies of the cross of Christ” because “they glory in their shame, with minds set on earthly things” (Phil 3:19).

Now of course the reference to ‘the colour of clothes’ would seem to have a specific reference to ecclesial careerism, where different ranks of church office are indicated by various shades of purple and red (don’t ask me to explain this, as it is something I have precisely zero interest in). And of course titles of honour also come into play in curial circles, perhaps more than in the general run of secular life for most people.

That being said, let no one think themselves free of vainglory and rivalry. The Eastern fathers of the desert are unanimous that it is a scourge of the interior life that can last long after many of the more gross and carnal vices have been conquered.

What is it, exactly? It is finding our value, not in the just and merciful judgment of God towards us, but in the good opinion of others. It is when what matters is not what you do or who you are, but what people think of what you do and are. And vainglory in its essence is a powerful damaging force in our lives.

Our whole being is to be so utterly God-centred—I think we can have a hard time grasping that and staying true to that. We really are meant to have God as our life and to care for nothing else very much but our life in Him and His in us. Of course when we are faithful to that we become exceedingly compassionate and concerned for our neighbours, since that is the nature of the God who we serve.

Vainglory persistently and corrosively erodes that God-centricity in favour of human respect. When we do good, not because it is what God asks of us, but for the sake of being liked or appreciated or noticed. When we pray and fast and live a dramatic spiritual life, not so as to become the saints of God He made us to be but to put on some kind of a holy show.

And of course vainglory is the great driver of compromise, of capitulating to the spirit of the age or of sacrificing one’s moral convictions so that ‘the people who matter’ will approve of us, or of that deadly silence when we really should speak out against some evil that is being done before us.

I admit that I don’t always follow Pope Francis’ thoughts entirely, and of course this is a very concise and brief treatment of vainglory he offers, so I’m not exactly sure what he means by false mysticism and quietism in this matter. I would like to hear him explain that further, to be honest—I’m sure he has something very particular in mind.

Meanwhile, it is Lent, and when we all go to church today to get our ashes we will hear much about praying, fasting, and doing alms in secret (meanwhile getting soot smeared on our foreheads, because we’re Catholics, and that’s just the way we roll!). It is this whole business of God seeing us, God knowing us, and God being the one to reward us—God, God, and God again, as the point of reference of our lives. So we can go unrewarded—unthanked, unnoticed, unappreciated, disrespected—with a peaceful spirit, if vainglory is not ruling our hearts.

The fathers are clear that it takes a long time to eradicate this vice, so we can be patient with ourselves in this matter as in all matters. And as we enter Lent let’s strive to put our minds, hearts, and eyes where they belong—on the Lord and his merciful love—and care for little but being a servant of that love and its recipient in this life and in the next.