Category: Lent

We are all beggars

Sr. Dorcee, beloved1 Comment

If you read my blog, you know that I enjoy reading Fr. Pat McNulty from Madonna House.  In a very recent article, he talks about experiencing poverty during Lent, discovering how poor we really are.  An excerpt:

Since that first Lent, much has changed in my life: there has been growth, healing, and conversion. But in some deep, deep place in my heart, I know that the real change hasn’t taken final hold yet. And it’s down there in those depths that I need to discover how poor I really am and how to beg for God’s mercy and for the ability to embrace this poverty with new hope and joy.

For I am insufficient unto myself. I, along with all of mankind, am on a restless pilgrimage, a pilgrimage in search of a final fulfillment which those who are truly poor know is theirs only in the kingdom of heaven.

We are all beggars! It’s nothing to be ashamed of. The Son of God was the poorest beggar of all, and it didn’t bother him a bit. It was, he said, his food to do the will of his Father!

But so many of us do not recognize our own poverty and thus cannot figure out why we are always so spiritually hungry.

Poverty?

I don’t love my spouse anymore. That’s poverty.

My child just died without warning in an accident. Why? Why? That’s poverty.

He’s a lousy preacher, but we’re stuck with him. That’s poverty.

My kids don’t have anything to do with God anymore. That’s poverty.

I don’t like this senior citizen dwelling I’m in. That’s poverty.

Why do you not heal me of this sickness, Lord? That’s poverty.

I spent a fortune on my education, and I can’t find a job commensurate with it anywhere. That’s poverty.

I’ve lost my job and I can’t find another one of any kind. That’s poverty.

I don’t want to grow old. That’s poverty.

I can’t stand my neighbour. That’s poverty.

I have no friends. That’s poverty.

Nobody understands me. That’s poverty.

Our poverty is all around us. We are all beggars. And The Beggar we follow has been there, done that, and wears the scars of those wounds. He knows exactly how to teach us to embrace our poverty as he embraced his. Even our need to be taught is our poverty!

Our desire to learn is our begging. And his response is the food that gives us new life.

Lent is a perfect desert-time for us to own our poverty, great or small, to put real words on it, to cry it out, to yell it out, to beg it out, and finally to embrace it as it is, whatever it is, and wrap it up in his mercy.

Then by Easter, after we’ve looked again with Jesus deep into our own personal poverty, the Risen Lord can show us how to reach out even more to one another—whether we are rich or poor.

If you want to read the whole article, just click here.

Good news for dust and ashes

Sr. Dorcee, belovedLeave a comment

I guess I’m still catching up with Lent.  .  .  .  Because of our dear friend’s death and her family still being in town and all of our grief and exhaustion, Ash Wednesday remains a blur–except for the oh-so-real words: “Remember, man, that you are dust and to dust you shall return.”  Here is an article by Fr. Pat McNulty from Madonna House on this very topic:

Good News for Dust and Ashes

by Fr. Pat McNulty.

One Ash Wednesday, the ashes on Fr. Pat’s forehead began a change in a young woman’s heart.

“No thanks, I only smoke filters,” she said as I offered her a cigarette. She was smoking filtered Kools. Yuck! I was smoking a real cigarette—Camels.

We found ourselves on the same train. She had boarded in Chicago and I in Ft. Wayne, Indiana. I took one of the few remaining seats in that car, the one next to her.

As I sat down, she politely whispered, “Excuse me, but you’ve got something all over your forehead.”

That “something” was ashes from the Ash Wednesday Mass I had just come from. They became the stimulus for a very nice ride together on Amtrack.

We eventually ended up in the dining car for coffee and a cigarette, and we talked about the weather, politics, the latest movies, the Chicago Bears, and finally, ashes and God.

My “Kool friend” was in her late twenties, a beautiful and intelligent young lady. She had the job of her dreams and the man of her dreams too—though, as I found out later, he was already married and had a family.

“I used to be a Christian,” she said, “but it never really took, I guess.”

“Oh, it always takes,” I said. “We just have to catch up to it.”

“I guess so. I don’t know much about your Catholic faith, but I have always been intrigued by your Ash Wednesday thing. How does it go?”

“Remember, thou art dust and unto dust thou shalt return.”

“Yes. That. Don’t you think it is a bit of bad news to be talking about God and dust? Isn’t religion supposed to be good news?”

“Well, if we don’t begin with the truth, if we filter it all out to suit our own purposes, then it’s not real news anymore, is it, let alone “good news?’”

“Yes, but…”

“Many people don’t believe in the extent of their own mortality until they see it with their own eyes. They do not believe they are totally involved with and dependant on a God who could return them all to dust forever in a flash and leave them there if he wanted to.”

“That doesn’t sound like good news to me.”

“The extent of our own mortality—dust thou art—and God’s loving presence mixed in with all the ashes, through Jesus Christ, is the Good News!”

“Meaning?”

I think we were both surprised when the conductor called her Ohio stop, because the time had passed so rapidly. We returned to our primary seats and, as she gathered her things together, I quickly wrote out my phone number and address on a book of matches I had taken from the dining car and gave it to her in case she wanted to talk more.

The train stopped. I helped her with some small luggage. She thanked me. I smiled and said to her, “Excuse me, but you’ve got something all over your forehead.” She quickly brushed it, looked at her hand, then at me. She was still laughing as she made her way up the aisle.

I’m sure people in the car wondered why the man with the Roman collar and the smudge mark on his forehead was waving to the young lady through the window as the train pulled away from the station. But I knew her repentance had begun.

It was almost two years later when I heard from her again, though I had not forgotten the incident. In fact, she had come to mind on the Ash Wednesday after that.

Her father had died since we had met, and because his long battle with cancer had left his body in such an appalling physical state, her mother had had him cremated. This had deprived her and her siblings of that final closure with their dad, which body-funerals can provide.

When they gathered for the scattering of the ashes into the winds over the Atlantic Ocean, she was devastated. He had been her best friend, and now he was just ashes thrown to the wind. “Why would God do that?” she asked.

We wrote to each other a few times off and on over the next year or so. She eventually returned to the Christian faith, met a young man at church, and they had set the wedding date. (Now why did that not surprise me?)

I was unable to be present for the wedding, but I sent her a special gift, my favorite crucifix, and I attached a piece of palm to it. I wanted her to have them.

And I reminded her that from such a simple Palm Sunday “thing” comes that powerful Ash Wednesday “thing” that had pointed her ever so gently toward repentance. “Excuse me, but you’ve got something all over your forehead.”

To this day when I receive ashes on Ash Wednesday, I cannot help but wonder how our chat would have turned out if I had taken my cue from the more cool, filtered Ash Wednesday blessing, “Repent,” etc. etc. vs. the real one, “Remember, thou art dust and unto dust thou shalt return.”

I don’t think the filtered version would have done it for this young lady. What she needed was the shock of real ashes leading to repentance.

And I believed it then as I believe it now: if you don’t get the “unto dust” part of Ash Wednesday first, you’ll never really get the “repent” part either.

P.S. She stopped smoking because her father had died from smoking-related causes. I asked her to pray that I could stop too. And if I knew where my “Kool” friend was today, I could let her know that this old “Camel” finally made it.

After frolicking with death by smoking for about forty years, I was finally able to stop about ten years ago. Till then I guess I imagined I was ready to return to dust anytime God wanted. But on second thought, I think I realized I needed more time to repent. Actually a lot more time!

What to give up for Lent

Sr. Dorcee, beloved3 Comments

I realize that Lent is well underway and numbers of you have already pondered this question: “What should I give up for Lent?”  and well on your way into Lent, giving that thing up as you decided. At the same time, there are probably some of you that are either behind in answering it . . . or perhaps you had an answer, but are not really doing what you set out to do.  Any of those is a good excuse for me to share my favorite answer to that perennial question–and probably one of the most important answers.  It comes from a Magnificat article written by Fr. Peter John Cameron a few years ago.  I do not have time to quote the whole article (which is always dangerous because what you read will be edited), but I hope–especially those of you who despair of ever giving up what he suggests we give up–that you will find some hope in what he says:

Here’s what to give this Lent: the doubt that goes, “I can never get closer to God because I’m too sinful, too flawed, too weak.”  This is a lethal attitude, for it based on the false presumption that we can possess something of our own–that does not come from God–by which we can please God.  Nothing could be farther from the truth.  Only what is from God can please God.  But as long as such error persists, we estrange ourselves from God.  Lent is not about lamenting our inadequacy.  Rather, it is a graced moment to receive from God what he is eager to give us so that we can live the friendship with him that he desires. . . .

He goes on to describe how often we try to substitute self-sufficiency for the lack that we find in ourselves–and this usually leads to an experience of darkness in our lives–“we may even wonder if God hates us.”  He allows the darkness in order to draw us back to him.  “The most reasonable thing we can do when that feeling strikes is “to renew our act of love and confidence in God’s love for us.  The Lord allows the darkness precisely to move us to unite ourselves all the more closely to him who alone is the Truth.”

Still–we panic!  We feel as if we are obliged to do for God what we know we are unable to do.  But the point of the pressure is to convince us to receive everything from God.  We can be sure that God himself is the one who, in his mercy, moves us to do what is not within our power.  This is the Father’s way of opening us a little more to himself by making us a little more in the likeness of his crucified Son.

For nothing glorifies God like the confidence in his mercy that we display when we feel indicted by our frailty and inability.  The experience of our hopelessness is a heaven-sent chance to exercise supremely confident trust.  God delights in giving us the grace to trust him.

Sadly, for those who refuse God’s gift of confidence, the darkness can turn to despair.  Yet even in despair the miracle of mercy is at work.  Father Jean-Baptiste Henri Lacordaire, the nineteenth-century Dominican priest who was responsible for the revival of the Order of Preachers in France after the French Revolution, makes this astonishing remark: “There is in despair a remnant of human greatness, because it includes a contempt for all created things, and consequently an indication of the incomparable capacity of our being.”  In our darkness, the incomparable capacity of our being will settle for nothing less than the embrace of the Infinite.  Like nothing else, our helplessness moves us to cry out for that embrace in confidence and trust.  The cry of forsakenness that Jesus emits from the cross is just this.

Saint Paul wrote, “We were left to feel like men condemned to death so that we might trust, not in ourselves, but in God who raises from the dead” (2 Cor 1.9, NAB).  That’s the point.  That’s the challenge of Lent.  God wants us to have the strength to believe in his love so much that we confidently beg for his mercy no matter how much we feel the horror of death in ourselves. . . .

Let us this Lent, in the face of all ours sins, our limitations, and our weakness cry out with Jesus, “My God, why have you forsaken me?”  And let us do so with certainty–not doubt or desperation–because our union with Christ crucified has given us the Way to approach reality.  In our asking we hold the Answer.

Pushing God aside

Sr. Dorcee, beloved1 Comment

“At the heart of all temptations is the act of pushing God aside because we perceive him as secondary, if not actually superfluous and annoying, in comparison with all the apparently far more urgent matters that fill our lives.” (Pope Benedict XVI)

And why do we do this?  Is it not because we forget who God truly is?  For if we remembered, we would never push Him aside, would we?  This is, in fact, my biggest temptation these days.  I have brought this to confession numerous times these past months.  For me, I push Him aside not so much because of the urgency of other matters–although that has been a big factor this past week–but because I am one of “little faith”, diminishing God to my idea of who I think He is, reducing His love to my narrow ideas of it.  Over and over again, I have had to decide to trust Him, to put my trust in who He says He is, rather than in my apparent experience at the moment—to let Him lead me out into the “wilderness” and there speak tenderly to my heart . . .  (Cf. Hosea 2.14)

and Angels danced

Sr. Dorcee, beloved2 Comments

A wonderful poem about the joy of the angels when any of us repents of our sin:

Choreography for Angels

I say to you, that there is joy among the angels in heaven upon one sinner doing penance . . . (Luke 15.10)

Who spun these Angels into dance
When wars are needing artillery
Of spirits’ cannonading.  Armistice
Wants first the over-powering wings, and they
Are occupied with pirouettes!  Who did this?

Gone penitent, I caused it.  I confess it.

Who tilted flames of Seraphim
In arabesques of pure delightedness?
Is not the cosmic crisis begging fire
For full destruction of hate’s hazarding?
Why Seraphs swirling flames on floors of heaven?

I lit the heavens, when I bent my head.

Who lined mystic corps-de-ballet
Of Cherubim?  Who set in pas-de-deux
This Power with this Principality?
Why these Archangels not on mission sent
Today, but waltzing on stars, and singing?

I am the one who did this.  I confess it.
I smote my errant heart, and Angels danced.

~Mother Mary Francis (Summon Spirit’s Cry)

What is your address?

Sr. Dorcee, beloved1 Comment

Tomorrow’s Gospel is about Jesus being led into the wilderness.  I am borrowing an article from Madonna House again today.  (One of the reasons that I love Madonna House articles is that they are so down to earth.)  This one is about looking at Jesus while we’re in the wilderness with Him and not at the desert.

What Is Your Address?

by Fr. Denis Lemieux.

Here is a composite of a series of conversations I’ve had recently:

Ring, ring… (Standard corporate North America telephone routine begins.)… push one-push two, working my way through the voice-mail maze… music, waiting… “Your call is important to us”… more music…

Finally, a friendly, human, non-electronic voice: “Hello, customer service. How may I help you?”

“Hello, I’m phoning to inform you of a change of address for my (bank statement/credit card bill/subscription to your magazine).”

“Would you give me your name and current mailing address.”

“My name is Fr. Denis Lemieux, and my current address is…”

I go blank. What is my address? Where am I? Which of eight possible addresses does this particular corporation have me at?

I yell down the hall at the parish secretary. “Martha, what’s the address here?” She gives it to me. I try it out on the friendly, non-electronic, customer-service lady. No. That’s not the one she has.

I try my previous address. This one works. I give my new address, thank her for her friendly manner. Just before hanging up, I say, “My life has been kind of unsettled lately.” “Sounds like it,” she replies.

In the last five years, I have moved fourteen times—four moves back and forth between the seminary and Madonna House (for the summer), four short-term assignments to MH field-houses, and (after ordination a year and a half ago) two short-term parish assignments.

That’s a lot of packing, unpacking, shunting around of boxes, names to learn, household routines and layouts to orient to, plane, train, and automobile trips.

So, perhaps I can be excused for the occasional memory lapse.

But that’s all behind me now, as I return to Madonna House in Combermere (move number fifteen!) to begin my (God-willing) looooong-term assignment to the training center here. It is good to be home, and even better to be able to put my suitcases into storage, at least for a while.

Starting over. New life. Beginning again. The phrases all have a nice ring for me at the moment.

Now that I’m back where I started from before “the moving years” began, it’s time to catch my breath, take stock, pull up my socks in any areas of life that need that particular wardrobe adjustment, and generally put my house in order, externally and internally.

It’s something we all need to do once in a while—start over. We even say it at times, especially when things have gone wrong. When life has become hard, relationships have failed, some situation or other has blown up in our faces. “I wish I could start from scratch…. I just want to go back to square one.”

I recall a line from a recent movie. One of the lead characters has made a mess of her life, and at a moment of crisis, cries out in despair, “I want to be a baby again. I want to be new.”

Lent is all about this poignant desire, all about this experience of wanting to start over, of wanting to be new. Every year the Church issues us an invitation, in its liturgical cycle, to catch our breath, to take stock, to put our houses into order. To start over.

On the First Sunday of Lent this year, we hear of Jesus going into the desert to fast, pray, and confront evil. In this year’s cycle we hear Mark’s telling of the story. Like most of Mark it is short, direct, and to the point.

The Spirit drove Jesus out into the desert, and he remained in the desert for forty days, tempted by Satan. He was among wild beasts, and the angels ministered to him (Mark 1:12-13).

The end. Two sentences, thirty-one words. It is such a short passage compared to Matthew and Luke’s detailed accounts that we can miss the depths it contains.

Jesus in the desert, according to Mark, is starting over again on behalf of the whole human race. Jesus is returning us, in himself, to our original human condition in the Garden.

He is not going into a garden, though, but into a desert, for sin has made the world such. But in this desert, like Adam and Eve, he exists in perfect harmony with the lower creation, the wild beasts, and with the higher creation, the angels.

In this desert, he is tempted like Adam and Eve were. And in this desert, he remains, in obscurity, in hiddenness, in silence, in the Spirit, for forty days.

Back to how it all began, back to “being a baby, being new,” back to humanity in its youth and innocence, yet living this newness and restored innocence in an environment that mirrors the inner spiritual environment of humanity marred by sin.

Lent is here, and the Church is summoning us to one more change of address, one more move. Out to the desert we are to go, out to spend a season with Jesus as he confronts (our) sin and evil in order to bring us to repentance and conversion.

Out to the desert to allow him to restore us to harmony with the lower creation, in this case, the lower part of ourselves. This is what fasting is about. We deny ourselves so that our disordered passions and desires may be tempered and brought into submission to the Holy Spirit dwelling in us.

Out to the desert we go, to be restored also to harmony with the higher creation. To pray, to set our minds more perfectly on God and the things of God. In this is included works of mercy, works of love, because we cannot touch God unless we reach out to our neighbour, to serve him in his need.

We do not go out to the desert, that is, we do not take on the Church’s Lenten project of prayer, fasting, and almsgiving, so as to renew ourselves, or to return ourselves to our lost innocence.

Any attempt at self-renewal, any attempt to make the desert into a garden by our own efforts and through our own abilities, is doomed to utter failure.

Out to the desert we are to go, ultimately because Jesus is there, and he is our only real “fixed address.” And it is in him, and through him, and with him, that we begin again. That we become new as babies, that we receive his gift of a new heaven and a new earth, a new humanity, an ever-new life.

If we look at the desert, look at our sins, look at the hard work of repentance—fasting, prayer, and all that—it is a dismal season. Just one more move in an unsettled life, and won’t it be great to move on to the next place!

But if we look at the One who calls us to the desert, especially if we look into his eyes, then we are home, and all is well. Then the eternal newness of Easter will run through our Lenten days like an underground stream, bringing us life and freshness.