I have been plagued by Jansenism most of my life, and Lent can be an especially difficult challenge in that regard. But over the past couple of years, God has been freeing me of this heresy by his sovereign intervention in my life and by writings like this by Joshua Elzner (building on my years of reading Thérèse). You can see that I have read and reread these pages a few times now. I share them with hope that your eyes may also be opened to the true heart of virtue.
Another poem from Malcolm Guite, speaking especially to those who feel like they are sinking.
The Christian Plummet
Down into the icy depths you plunge,
The cold dark undertow of your depression,
Even your memories of light made strange,
As you fall further from all comprehension.
You feel as though they’ve thrown you overboard,
Your fellow Christians on the sunlit deck,
A stone-cold Jonah on whom scorn is poured,
A sacrifice to save them from the wreck.
But someone has their hands on your long line,
You sound for them the depths they sail above,
One who takes Jonah as his only sign
Sinks lower still to hold you in his love,
And though, you cannot see, or speak, or breathe,
The everlasting arms are underneath.
Malcolm Guite
Still one of my favorite pieces of art that I’ve done. Who is god like our God who speaks tenderly to us in our sinfulness?
(Oops. I meant to schedule this for this coming Sunday, but made a mistake. I trust God will use it for you now.) This Sunday I offer you this bit of a longer poem by Gregory of Narek:
Refuge for my broken spirit lies in your
living incorruptible, constant hope,
that looking on me with mercy,
as one condemned to perdition,
when I present myself before your heavenly beneficence,
empty-handed and without gifts,
bringing with me the evidence of your untold glory,
I will remind you
who never shuts your eyes,
never ignores the sighs of grief,
that with your cross of light
you may lift away from me, I beg you, the peril that chokes me,
with your comforting care, the vacillating sadness,
with your crown of thorns, the germs of my sin,
with the lashes of the whip, the blows of death,
with the memory of the slap in the face, the neediness of my shame,
with the spitting of your enemies, my contemptible vileness,
with your sip of vinegar, the bitterness of my soul.
Gregory of Narek
A lovely, lovely poem from Malcolm Guite. I find it most encouraging at the beginning of this Lent. Lent can be a discouraging time for many of us because we are so aware of our obvious faults.
Through the Gate
Begin the song exactly where you are,
For where you are contains where you have been
And holds the vision of your final sphere.
And do not fear the memory of sin;
There is a light that heals, and, where it falls,
Transfigures and redeems the darkest stain
Into translucent colour. Loose the veils
And draw the curtains back, unbar the doors,
Of that dread threshold where your spirit fails.
The hopeless gate that holds in all the fears
That haunt your shadowed city fling it wide
And open to the light that finds, and fares
Through the dark pathways where you run and hide.
Through all the alleys of your riddled heart,
As pierced and open as his wounded side.
Open the map to him and make a start,
And down the dizzy spirals, through the dark,
His light will go before you. Let him chart
And name and heal. Expose the hidden ache
To him, the stinging fires and smoke that blind
Your judgments, carry you away, the mirk
And muted gloom in which you cannot find
The love that you once thought dying for.
Call him to all you cannot call to mind.
He comes to harrow Hell and now to your
Well-guarded fortress let his love descend.
The icy ego at your frozen core
Can hear his call at last. Will you respond?
Jan Richardson is a poet I discovered just a few years ago. My favorite book of hers is the one from which this poem is taken. She has a number of poems just for this day, Ash Wednesday.
I repost this every Lent. It’s still the best recommendation as far as I am concerned.
This comes from a Magnificat article written by Fr. Peter John Cameron quite a few years ago. I do not have time to quote the whole article (which is always dangerous because what you read below 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.
A profound meditation from Amy Carmichael:
The last thing He did before His hands were bound.
And one of them smote the servant of the high priest, and cut off his right ear. And Jesus answered and said, Suffer you thus far. And He touched his ear and healed him. (Luke 22. 50, 51)
Then the band and the captain and the officers of the Jews took Jesus and bound Him. (John 18.12)
The last thing the Lord Jesus did before His hands were bound, was to heal.
Have you asked yourself, If I knew this was the last thing I should do, what would I do? I have never found the answer to that question. There are so very, very many things that would want to do for those whom we love, that I do not think we are likely to be able to find the chief one of all these. So the best thing is just to go on simply, doing each thing as it comes as well as we can.
Our Lord Jesus spent much time in healing sick people, and in the natural course of events it happened that the last thing He did with His kind hands was to heal a bad cut. (I wonder how they could have the heart to bind His hands after that.)
In this as in everything, He left us an example that we should follow in His steps. Do the thing that this next minute, this next hour, brings you, faithfully and lovingly and patiently; and then the last thing you do, before power to do is taken from you (if that should be), will be only the continuation of all that went before.
I repost this every Lent. It’s still the best recommendation as far as I am concerned.
This 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.
Witnesses to Hope 