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?
I will allure her
Refuge for my broken spirit.
(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
Do not fear the memory of sin
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?
Blessing the dust
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.
“For you, for Ash Wednesday, with gratitude. May we keep learning what God does with dust; may we be part of the answer. So many blessings to you, beloveds, as Lent arrives.”
BLESSING THE DUST
All those days
you felt like dust,
like dirt,
as if all you had to do
was turn your face
toward the wind
and be scattered
to the four corners
or swept away
by the smallest breath
as insubstantial—
did you not know
what the Holy One
can do with dust?
This is the day
we freely say
we are scorched.
This is the hour
we are marked
by what has made it
through the burning.
This is the moment
we ask for the blessing
that lives within
the ancient ashes,
that makes its home
inside the soil of
this sacred earth.
So let us be marked
not for sorrow.
And let us be marked
not for shame.
Let us be marked
not for false humility
or for thinking
we are less
than we are
but for claiming
what God can do
within the dust,
within the dirt,
within the stuff
of which the world
is made
and the stars that blaze
in our bones
and the galaxies that spiral
inside the smudge
we bear.
—Jan Richardson
from Circle of Grace: A Book of Blessings for the Seasons
What to give up for Lent
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.
“This is how we need to be with God . . . “
This photo, taken back in 2018, is currently making the rounds again on social media. The current description is inaccurate, but the point of the photo is still meaningful. Here is a pope who encourages the little ones to come to him.
I was in Rome in 2022 for a personal meeting with the pope. The day after, we attended the General Audience, and a beautiful thing happened there. It ended up being a very personal word to me from the Lord . . . and perhaps for you, too.
The Garments of God
The poem I chose for last Sunday–“Suspended”–reminds me of another poem, one I have posted before, but am going to do again because it’s always worth a re-read. Both speak of God’s garments and our touching them. In “Suspended”, the author’s “hand slipped on the rich silk of it.” In this one, Jessica Powers writes of holding fast to it, clutching it.
The Garments of God
God sits on a chair of darkness in my soul.
He is God alone, supreme in His majesty.
I sit at His feet, a child in the dark beside Him;
my joy is aware of His glance and my sorrow is tempted
to nest on the thought that His face is turned from me.
He is clothed in the robes of His mercy, voluminous garments–
not velvet or silk and affable to the touch,
but fabric strong for a frantic hand to clutch,
and I hold to it fast with the fingers of my will.
Here is my cry of faith, my deep avowal
to the Divinity that I am but dust.
Here is the loud profession of my trust.
I need not go abroad
to the hills of speech or the hinterlands of music
for a crier to walk in my soul where all is still.
I have this potent prayer through good or ill:
here in the dark I clutch the garments of God.
Jessica Powers
Only a little hill
(I posted this almost 14 years ago, but someone found it yesterday and “liked” it. I’m thinking it might be good to share again because we all have our little hills.)
Did you ever wonder about Mizar in Ps 42–where it was and what was its significance? (Maybe you didn’t, but have I piqued your curiosity?) Here’s Amy Carmichael’s take on it:
Ps 42.6 The Hill Mizar
Did you ever feel that you had nothing great enough to be called a trouble, and yet you very much needed help? I have been finding much encouragement in the hill Mizar. For Mizar means littleness–the little hill. The land of Jordan was a place where great floods (the swelling of Jordan) might terrify the soul, and the land of the Hermonites was a place of lions and leopards [FYI: these are the places mentioned in this verse]; but Mizar was only a little hill: and yet the word is, I will “remember You from . . . the hill Mizar”, from the little hill.
So just where we are, from the place of our little trial, little pain, little difficulty, little temptation (if temptation can ever be little), let us remember our God. Relief will surely come, and victory and peace; for “the Lord will command His lovingkindness” (v. 8), even to us in our little hill.
Even in my wretchedness
Suspended
A Sunday poem by Denise Levertov.
Suspended
I had grasped God’s garments in the void
but my hand slipped on the rich silk of it.
The ‘everlasting arms’ my sister loved to remember
must have upheld my leaden weight from falling, even so,
for though I claw at empty air and feel nothing, no embrace,
I have not plummeted.
Witnesses to Hope 