Living Lent

contemplatively

In the Heart of Christ

Dear Friends of the Heart of Christ,

          In my accumulated years of experiencing Lent, it always seems that the Lord reserves special ‘crosses’ for that liturgical season. Things emerge, sometimes unexpectedly and even unpleasantly (on a natural scale) that often make me cringe inside… new worries, new aches and pains, new predicaments, etc. that I find myself grappling with… as I suppose all of us are inclined to. The difference is, that as a Christian and a religious, I am aware that my life is linked by a bond to the Lord Jesus and at such times I am glad for the insights I find in my spiritual reading and times of quiet reflection and prayer. Just the other day, as I was chanting the psalms, the words of Psalm 57 wrapped themselves around my consciousness. They said: “I call to God the Most High, to God who has always been my help. May he send from heaven and save me… May God send his truth and his love.”

        There was something deeply reassuring in hearing these words: “God who has always been my help.” God was with me, the moment I called out to Him, the divine presence was there, saving and protecting and enlightening and uplifting. If I would only pay more attention to what God was communicating; if only I would take the time to listen and heed His words!

          Lent is about listening more than usual. One of the ‘admonitions’ that often comes into the lenten liturgy is how little the people of Israel really listened to the words of the Lord. Distractions came upon them in many forms. It was the daily grind of survival and temptation that pulled them away from thinking about the spiritual side of life in a more profound way. Thus we encounter the prophets who appeared on the scene and seemed to be shouting in the ears of the people or (even metaphorically) grabbing them by the throat, so that they could gain their attention. The Lord desired His people to do certain things: act uprightly, practice justice, correct their faults, stop sinning, walk humbly, trustfully, faithfully. But first, they must be attentive. They must enter that ‘contemplative’ space where they could be face to face with their God.

        To underscore the importance of this principle, the First Sunday of Lent (actually the first day) gives us a look at the ‘contemplative’ Jesus as He journeys into the barren desert for an extended period of prayer and fasting. The second Sunday of Lent adds another dimension: Jesus ascends Mount Tabor and undergoes a divine transfiguration before His chosen disciples. Jesus’ public ministry, moreover, is punctuated by these occasions of personal encounter with no one other than His Father in heaven. Even in the final days before His passion begins, Jesus is alone in the garden of Gethsemene, entrusting Himself into the providential plan of God. He has listened and prayed in silence and must sense, on a deeply intuitive level, that the words of the Psalmist will come true: God will help Him… but at the proper time and with the inscrutable wisdom of the Father’s will.

         So it is all important to begin, and begin again. St. Francis de Sales insightfully tells us that “each day we must begin again with renewed courage.” We must summon to our minds and hearts and wills the determination to speak to the Lord each day from our hearts, even if that means sacrificing a few minutes of our precious time. The lessons of the Gospel relate the importance of having a spiritual balance in regard to time. Jesus’ words exhort us to develop a responsible concern that God’s moments of grace-filled presence do not go by unheeded. Yet, His words also encourage us to surrender our innate desires to control time and slowly put our anxieties in managing it into the hands of God’s providential care. We must in some ways be like Saint Margaret Mary who left all the troubles and endless complexities of human living in the wise and ever-knowing heart of her God.

         Jesus’ journey into the desert for forty-days and forty-nights conveys how ‘proportionally’ significant the place of prayer (and fasting) should be in our lives. Lent provides this opportunity for promoting the contemplative areas in each of us and allows us the chance to ‘re-align’ ourselves to a purely non-activistic mode of existence, where God’s presence can fully engulf our spirits.

         To see ourselves as we really are before the eyes of God is another aspect of the contemplative journey of Lent. Here we do not put on the rose-tinted glasses of the optimist, but acknowledge like the tax-collector in Luke’s parable that we are in need of the great mercy of God [Luke 18: 9 -14]. If we recall the gist of this story, we see that it was addressed to the Pharisees who spent their days in the Temple and who considered themselves ‘privileged’ in their occupation. So Jesus recounts for them this parable to offset their self-assurance and conceit. One day two men went into the temple to pray, a Pharisee and a tax collector. The Pharisee said, “O God, I thank thee that I am not as the rest of men, thieves, unjust, adulterers, or even as this tax collector. I fast twice a week, I give a tenth of all that I get.” The tax collector, standing afar off, would not even lift his eyes, and kept beating his breast, saying: “O God be merciful to me – the sinner.”

         The scripture scholar William Barclay has some very instructive things to say about this well-known Lukan parable. He points out that the Pharisee did not really go to pray to God. Instead he prayed with himself, giving himself a testimonial before God. He wanted to inform God how good he was. The tax collector, on the other hand, stood far away, not lifting up his eyes. His prayer: “O God, be merciful to me, the sinner.” Not a sinner, but the sinner, Barclay notes. He is the sinner, par excellence. It was this self-despising prayer that won him acceptance before God, he affirms. Therefore, “we must remember that we are one of a great army of sinning, suffering, sorrowing humanity, all kneeling before the throne of God’s mercy.”

          Perhaps the most obvious yet often overlooked dimension of our ‘contemplative immersion’ during Lent is that of faith. The whole life of Jesus, but most particularly the final sequence of events which comprise His suffering, death, and resurrection take us toward a new level of faith that is also reflected in how we should pray. Always there is that inherent tension present with Jesus that He is expected to extricate Himself from His difficulties. No one, not even His closest disciples, quite believe that Jesus will actually undergo His excruciating end without performing some sign of human release from it. His faith and trust in the mysterious workings of God astounds all, and herein lies the significant message for His followers, that God works, optimally, in the obscurity of faith. So we carry to our Christian contemplative experience these same sentiments. Though there can be times of great relish in the process of prayer, to advance to the heights will mean passage into uncharted spiritual terrain, where the human assistance of knowledge will not serve to enlighten or direct us. Only by the gift of faith will the darkness be illumined, only by our loving trust in God will our steps be guided homeward toward the Divine Heartland.

        And so we carry the torch of this faith in our hearts as we continue our daily duties and responsibilities and come to understand that God will indeed help us, has been helping us all along to be living beacons of his Sacred Heart giving praise to its glory and becoming immersed into that glory as well. How fitting that today’s Sunday gospel of the Transfiguration should remind us of this: that we are called to participate in Jesus’ glory, not just be onlookers of it, but truly to be caught up and re-created in its wonder and magnificence. To live Lent contemplatively has this connotation about it for we shall be made like Him whom we love. Our earthly wounds will be transformed like the wounds of our Redeemer, and having been purified by the process of prayer, we shall be known as the beloved of God. †

This talk was given by one of the Sisters at the Monastery of the Visitation in Tyringham, Massachusetts on March 1st, 2015.