The Wonders of Lent

It is very easy in the midst of personal pressures and private confusions, of public stress and social challenge, to forget the wonders God has done for us. God often performs these marvels when we are least hopeful they will happen, least sure they can happen.

Out of death, after pain diminishes and numbness fades, new life so often comes forth. After the loss of one direction, another more vibrant than the first so often emerges. Beyond what the world says are our best years, comes a fullness of life unmatched by any other stage.

These are the miracles of life. These are the wonders we stumble into, so obviously not of our own making that they must be of God. These are the things that must be remembered in the midst of the daily, dull, depressing moments of life.

Good has so often come out of even more shabby parts of our own life. We retreat from religion because it disappoints only to find no better answers elsewhere and return more spiritual than ever before. We fail ourselves miserably, then find new life when we discover that people loved us for ourselves, not our images. We get stopped in our indulgent, dishonest, ambitious, shiftless tracks and become newer better ourselves. These are the wonders of life.

It is a wholesome part of Lent, then, to remember where God has been faithful and we have strayed, how God has loved us even when we have been least lovable, least aware, least immersed in the mind of God. We need to rehearse in our hearts that it was often in darkness that God was clearest to us. For without memory, hope dies.

The creation of the Covenant did not end the struggles Israel had to face. It simply confirmed the fact that whatever fray they faced, they would not be alone.

Our own lives take the same pattern. Every life is filled with a series of small miracles designed to carry us through dark days, up steep mountains, down into the valley of death, beyond every spiritual boundary.

One of the spiritual disciplines of Lent is to recognize these, to let praise raise in our hearts. We need to see the miracles of our lives as signs along the way that no path is too twisted, no burden so heavy, no social system so impenetrable as to confound us utterly. The God who has sustained us in the past will not desert us in the present.

Praise and memory take us into tomorrow with open minds and certain hearts.

by Joan Chittister

Talkative and Taciturn Christianity

THE FILM opened "to rapturous acclaim across the Western world". "It has been a phenomenal box-office smash-hit." So says the slip-case which the DVD comes in. This is not the latest Hollywood blockbuster, nor a new James Bond or Harry Potter. It is a documentary, 19 years in the making and nearly three hours long, recording life inside the monastery of the Grande Chartreuse in the French Alps.

Here the monks pass their days, indeed, their whole lives, almost entirely in silence. The film is largely silent, too, apart from the chants we hear from the great abbey church. In its English version, the film is entitled Into Great Silence. As we approach the cross, we enter, with Jesus, "into great silence".

Our readings interpret the Passion of Jesus as a fulfilment of the role of "the servant", about whom the anonymous prophet speaks, whose oracles form the later chapters of our book of Isaiah. We hear the servant tell us that God gave him "a teacher's tongue", and that he knows how "to sustain the weary with a word". From the day of his baptism to the hour of his arrest, "the common people heard Jesus gladly" (Mark 12.37), and many were the weary whom he consoled by the timely word.

Yet it is not in his sayings, but in his silence, that Jesus is most like the promised servant. "He was oppressed and afflicted, yet he did not open his mouth; he was led like a lamb to the slaughter, and as sheep before her shearers is dumb, so he did not open his mouth" (Isaiah 53.7). We recognise in this silent figure the one we know as Jesus of Nazareth.

Matthew's Passion narrative, closely following that of Mark, is a study of "the silence of the Lamb". Jesus is silent before those who accuse him and torture him. He is silent before the orchestrated demands of the crowd for his death. And, after the briefest of exchanges, he is silent before Pontius Pilate.

"Are you the King of the Jews?" asks Pilate. "So you say," says Jesus. Pilate must decide for himself - as we must - who he is. Then Jesus says no more, so that Pilate wonders, as well he might.

According to Mark, the earliest Gospel, the silence of Christ crucified is broken only by one terrible utterance: "My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?" (Mark 15.34) So vividly is this cry recalled that the very Aramaic in which it was uttered is remembered.

Matthew, too, has just this one cry of dereliction. To be sure, the other Gospels record other sayings from the cross. According to Luke, Jesus prays for our forgiveness, because we did not know what we were doing. He promises paradise to the penitent thief. As he dies, he commends his spirit to his father (Luke 23.34, 43, 46).

John, too, has three sayings. Jesus commends his mother to his beloved disciple. He cries "I thirst," and, at the last, triumphantly: "It is finished" (John 19.26-7, 28, 30).

We cling to these words, and it is to our profit that we do so. But, having said them, Jesus speaks no more. The great silence is now unbroken. And into that silence, the silence the other side of utterance, we must enter.

There are two types of Christianity - the talkative and the taciturn. There is the Christianity that goes on and on, and there is the Christianity that shuts up. Talkative Christianity delights in argument. Talkative Christianity proves the existence of God.

Talkative Christianity gives you reasons, reasons for believing in the virgin birth, in the resurrection, in life after death. Talkative Christianity tries to explain everything. It even tries to explain how a loving and powerful God can permit the innocent to suffer.

Taciturn Christianity respects the mystery of things. We try, as try we must, to dispel confusion, superstition, and misunderstanding. But the enigma of it all only deepens. Taciturn Christianity does not always try to explain, but simply watches and waits beneath the cross, echoing in its own heart the anguished "Why?" of the one who hangs there.

Taciturn Christianity reaches into the great silence of Christ crucified. That is the vocation of the monk and nun committed to the silent quest for God, knowing that only where words cease is God to be found. The rest of us, whose misfortune it is not to live in a monastery, must seek whatever silence we can salvage from the clamour of our days.

What survives of silence can sometimes be found in an empty church. R. S. Thomas writes:

To one kneeling down no word came,
Only the wind's song, saddening the lips
Of the grave saints, rigid in glass;
Or the dry whisper of unseen wings,
Bats not angels, in the high roof.

Was he balked by silence? He kneeled long
And saw love in a dark crown
Of thorns blazing, and a winter tree
Golden with fruit of a man's body.

Reflections on: Isaiah 50.4-9a; Philippians 2.5-11; Matthew 27. 11-54
by John Pridmore published in The Church Times

Lectio Divina

BE COMMITTED:
Don't read about lectio or make retreats on lectio...do lectio.
Take time every day to pray.
Be regular about it.
Find a place and a time.
You become a pianist by playing the piano.
You become a writer by writing.
You become a cook by cooking.
You learn to pray by praying.

BE HUMBLE: There is no magic formula for prayer, no easy way, no way on earth that you can force prayer, no "one way fits all" prayer. You can't find God by a method.

BE HONEST: really wrestle with the text. Don't be satisfied with platitudes. Don't settle for the superficial. Don't repeat to yourself what you've learned about this scripture or about God since you were a child. Lectio is meaningless unless you apply the text to your own life. How do you feel, really feel about the text, not how are you supposed to feel. Are you angry, be angry. Are you jealous, admit it. Have you lost your faith, say it.
Are you questioning God, question God. You've got to trust how you feel.

PRAY AS YOU CAN, not as you can't.
Writing is my way of praying. Maybe art is yours or music or dance or chanting or singing or silence or whatever...Again, there is no one size fits all prayer method.

So why do we do lectio?

Well, the ancients give us this answer:

Once upon a time a disciple asked the elder, "Holy One, is there anything I can do to make myself enlightened?"

And the Holy One answered, "As little as you can do to make the sun rise in the morning."

"Then of what use," the surprised disciple asked, "are all these spiritual disciplines you prescribe--fasting, lectio, meditation, almsgiving?"

And the Holy One answered, "To make sure that you are not asleep when the sun begins to rise."

From Light Through Stained Glass Windows by Susan Doubet, osb

Background on Lectio Divina