What to give up for Lent

Sr. Dorcee, beloved2 Comments

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 . . . “

Sr. Dorcee, beloved2 Comments

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

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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

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(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.

A shy yet solemn glory

Sr. Dorcee, beloved3 Comments

A Sunday poem.

Music

When I was a child
I once sat sobbing on the floor
Beside my mother’s piano
As she played and sang
For there was in her singing
A shy yet solemn glory
My smallness could not hold

And when I was asked
Why I was crying
I had no words for it
I only shook my head
And went on crying

Why is it that music
At its most beautiful
Opens a wound in us
An ache a desolation
Deep as a homesickness
For some far-off
And half-forgotten country

I’ve never understood
Why this is so

But there’s an ancient legend
From the other side of the world
That gives away the secret
Of this mysterious sorrow

For centuries on centuries
We have been wandering
But we were made for Paradise
As deer for the forest

And when music comes to us
With its heavenly beauty
It brings us desolation
For when we hear it
We half remember
That lost native country

We dimly remember the fields
Their fragrant windswept clover
The birdsongs in the orchards
The wild white violets in the moss
By the transparent streams

And shining at the heart of it
Is the longed-for beauty
Of the One who waits for us
Who will always wait for us
In those radiant meadows

Yet also came to live with us
And wanders where we wander.

                         Anne Porter

Fill in the blank

Sr. Dorcee, belovedLeave a comment

The second antiphon for morning prayer this morning (Feast of the Conversion of St. Paul) reads: “Paul, my grace is sufficient for you; my power is made perfect in weakness.” I felt the Holy Spirit nudging me to put my own name in place of Paul’s and pray it again: “Dorcee, my grace is sufficient for you; my power is made perfect in weakness.” I would like to suggest that you do the same. Place your name in the blank and then pray it slowly a few times. For it is truth for your soul as well as Paul’s.

_____________________________, my grace is sufficient for you; my power is made perfect in your weakness. 

_____________________________, my grace is sufficient for you; my power is made perfect in your weakness. 

_____________________________, my grace is sufficient for you; my power is made perfect in your weakness. 

Let God come to you first

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I recently recommended a few of Joshua Elzner’s books. Today I would like to post an excerpt from another of his books. It speaks to me deeply–as I assume it will also to you–because he addresses the times when we feel like we just cannot pray the way that we desire. May it bring you hope, as it did for me this very day.

“I have no desire to forsake prayer, to live it behind and to busy myself instead with superficial things. But I cannot pray in the way that I am accustomed, in the way that I would desire. But how can I go beyond this dilemma: to pray when I am incapable of praying, to rest when I am incapable of resting, to gaze upon God when I am incapable of gazing? The only answer lies in letting God come to me first, in letting him draw near to meet me in the very place where I feel my poverty and incapacity so deeply. I will not find him in the flight from my weakness to the periphery, where I occupy myself with things to distract my attention from the pain, things with which I try to pass the time that I once spent in prayer and recollection and filial play in his presence. But neither will I find him in the forceful effort by which, with the vigorous activity of my will or my intellect, I try to break through my limitations and to achieve what he is not giving. Rather, I will find him only when I sink down into the very heart of my littleness and incapacity, when I let him approach me, touch me, and cradle me at the heart of my deepest weakness, poverty, and greed.

“And when this happens . . . ah, when this happens! Then the very pain and incapacity and weakness that hemmed me in before become a living sacrament of his presence! The very difficulty and suffering that I experience become a living space of his compassionate love, which sensitizes my heart both to his own goodness as well as to the suffering of my brothers and sisters, which, in him and with him, I tenderly take up into my heart and hold in his presence. My suffering, in other words, becomes a living space of yet deeper encounter and get more profound intimacy. Yes, my poverty becomes but the flip side of his abundant fullness; my incapacity becomes a living space of receptivity to the ceaseless activity of his love; my pain and restlessness in the suffering of my body and my spirit, touched by him and surrendered to him, becomes pervaded by a deeper peace and rest and serenity.

“The pain and incapacity do not disappear, as God does not somehow dissolve my limitations and make possible what, in my very suffering, is now impossible. Rather, he permeates the living space of my consciousness with his presence, such that he meets me in my very littleness and limitation, and makes this something radiant and expansive and beautiful. For, after all, what makes something truly great is not what it looks like on the outside, How much it sparkles in the eyes of the world, but simply how much God there is in it, and how totally and intimately it is held by him, permeated by his presence, and filled with the sweetness of his love and tenderness.”

(Joshua Elzner, The Prayer of the Heart)