Category Archives: LENT
LENT: Week six, Saturday – Practice Resurrection
Love the quick profit, the annual raise,
vacation with pay. Want more
of everything ready-made. Be afraid
to know your neighbors and to die.
And you will have a window in your head.
Not even your future will be a mystery
any more. Your mind will be punched in a card
and shut away in a little drawer.
When they want you to buy something
they will call you. When they want you
to die for profit they will let you know.
So, friends, every day do something
that won’t compute. Love the Lord.
Love the world. Work for nothing.
Take all that you have and be poor.
Love someone who does not deserve it.
Denounce the government and embrace
the flag. Hope to live in that free
republic for which it stands.
Give your approval to all you cannot
understand. Praise ignorance, for what man
has not encountered he has not destroyed.
Ask the questions that have no answers.
Invest in the millenium. Plant sequoias.
Say that your main crop is the forest
that you did not plant,
that you will not live to harvest.
Say that the leaves are harvested
when they have rotted into the mold.
Call that profit. Prophesy such returns.
Put your faith in the two inches of humus
that will build under the trees
every thousand years.
Listen to carrion — put your ear
close, and hear the faint chattering
of the songs that are to come.
Expect the end of the world. Laugh.
Laughter is immeasurable. Be joyful
though you have considered all the facts.
So long as women do not go cheap
for power, please women more than men.
Ask yourself: Will this satisfy
a woman satisfied to bear a child?
Will this disturb the sleep
of a woman near to giving birth?
Go with your love to the fields.
Lie down in the shade. Rest your head
in her lap. Swear allegiance
to what is nighest your thoughts.
As soon as the generals and the politicos
can predict the motions of your mind,
lose it. Leave it as a sign
to mark the false trail, the way
you didn’t go.
Be like the fox
who makes more tracks than necessary,
some in the wrong direction.
Practice resurrection.
- Wendell Berry, The Mad Farmer Liberation Front
LENT: Week six, Good Friday – Salvation
Many years ago now, when I was invited to speak at a church gathering, my host said, “Tell us what is saving your life now.” It was such a good question that I have made a practice of asking others to answer it even as I continue to answer it myself. Salvation is so much more than many of its proponents would have us believe. In the Bible, human being experience God’s salvation when peace ends war, when food follows famine, when health supplants sickness and freedom trumps oppression. Salvation is a word for the divine spaciousness that comes to human beings in all the tight places where their lives are at risk, regardless of how they got there or whether they know God’s name. Sometimes it comes as an extended human hand and sometimes as a bolt from the blue, but either way it opens a door in what looked for the world like a wall. This is the way of life, and God alone knows how it works.
HOUSE NEWS: St. Pat’s Easter Basket Project
Yesterday, we were grateful to have students from St. Patrick’s Interparish School join us for Dorothy’s Farmer Market Cafe. Besides helping out at the Cafe, the students and their parents had put together over 60 Easter baskets to share with our friends and guests who join us for lunch on Wednesdays. Some baskets were Easter-traditional, including candy and sweets, and were available for folks to take to their kids, nieces and nephews, etc. Other baskets included items like deodorant, playing cards, shampoo AND some candy. It was one of our largest cafes in recent weeks with over 75 people coming by and sharing a meal. Thanks to everyone who helped out and a special thanks to the students from St. Pat’s!
LENT: Week six, Thursday – Recollection
Sometimes from sorrow, for no reason,
you sing. For no reason, you accept
the way of being lost, cutting loose from all else and electing a world where you go
where you want to.
Arbitrary, sound comes, a reminder
that a steady center is holding
all else. If you listen, that sound will tell where it is, and you can slide your way past trouble.
Certain twisted monsters
always bar the path—but that’s when you get going best, glad to be lost, learning how real it is
here on the earth, again and again.
- William Stafford, Cutting Loose
LENT: Week six, Wednesday – You don’t have that kind of time
When I was 38, my best friend, Pammy, died, and we went shopping about two weeks before she died, and she was in a wig and a wheelchair. I was buying a dress for this boyfriend I was trying to impress, and I bought a tighter, shorter dress than I was used to. And I said to her, ‘Do you think this makes my hips look big?’ and she said to me, so calmly, ‘Anne, you don’t have that kind of time.’ And I think Easter has been about the resonance of that simple statement; and that when I stop, when I go into contemplation and meditation, when I breathe again and do the sacred action of plopping and hanging my head and being done with my own agenda, I hear that, ‘You don’t have that kind of time,’ you have time only to cultivate presence and authenticity and service, praying against all odds to get your sense of humor back.
LENT: Week six, Tuesday – Belonging
Early-stage religion is more about belonging and believing than about transformation. When belonging and believing are the primary concerns, people don’t see their need for growth, healing, or basic spiritual curiosity. Once we let the group substitute for an inner life or our own faith journey, all we need to do is “attend.” For several centuries, church has been more a matter of attendance at a service than an observably different lifestyle. Membership requirements and penalties predominated, not the change-your-life message that Jesus so clearly preached.
Membership questions lead to endless arguments about who is in and who is out, who is right and who is wrong, who is worthy of our God, and who is not. Such distinctions appeal to our ego and its need to feel worthy and superior and to be part of a group that defines itself by exclusion. The church ends up a gated country club, giving people a false sense of superiority. This is why Jesus walks to those on the edges: the handicapped, the sinners, the excluded ones.
LENT: Week six, Monday – Discipline
Are there any disciplines to keep us moving from dividing power to uniting power, from destructive power to healing power, from paralyzing power to enabling power? Let me suggest three disciplines that can help us look from above with the eyes of God:
- The first discipline is to focus continually on the poor in this world. We must keep asking ourselves: Where are the men, women and children who are waiting for us to reach out to them? Poverty in all its forms–physical, intellectual and emotional–is not decreasing. On the contrary, the poor are everywhere around us. As the powers of darkness show their hideous intentions with increasing crudeness, the weeping of the poor becomes louder and their misery more visible. We have to keep listening. We have to keep looking.
- The second discipline is to trust that God will truly care for the poor that are given to us. We will have the financial, emotional and physical support we need, when we need it, and to the degree that we need it. I am convinced that there is a large body of people ready to help with money, time and talent. But that body will remain invisible unless we dare to take new risks. If we want to have all our bases covered before we act, nothing exciting will happen. But if we dare to take a few crazy risks because God asks us to do so, many doors, which we didn’t even know existed, will be opened for us.
- The third discipline is the hardest one. It is the discipline of being surprised, not by suffering, but by joy…. There is suffering ahead of us, immense suffering, a suffering that will continue to tempt us to think that we have chosen the wrong road and that others were more shrewd than we. But don’t be surprised by pain. Be surprised by joy. Be surprised by the little flower that shows its beauty in the midst of a barren desert. And be surprised by the immense healing power that keeps bursting forth like a spring of fresh water from the depth of our pain.
With an eye focused on the poor, a heart trusting that we will get what we need, and a spirit always surprised by joy, we will be truly powerful. We will walk through this valley of darkness performing miracles because it is God’s power that will go out from us wherever we go and whomever we meet.
Henri Nouwen, Power, Powerlessness and Power
LENT: Week six, Sunday – Church
On the whole, I do not find Christians, outside the catacombs, sufficiently sensible of the conditions. Does any-one have the foggiest idea what sort of power we so blithely invoke? Or, as I suspect, does no one believe a word of it? The churches are children playing on the floor with their chemistry sets, mixing up a batch of TNT to kill a Sunday morning. It is madness to wear ladies’ straw hats and velvet hats to church; we should all be wearing crash helmets. Ushers should issue life preservers and signal flares; they should lash us to our pews. For the sleeping god may wake some day and take offense, or the waking god may draw us out to where we can never return.
- Annie Dillard
[photo: two of the famous stained glass windows of Sainte Chapelle in Paris, where French royalty once prayed - located a few steps from the Conciergie, aka "the antechamber to the guillotine"]
LENT: Week five, Saturday – Dancing with God
“‘The voyage was not without reward for Alan,’ Marc said. ‘But we are left with Anne’s question. Why would God bring him all this way only to die now?’ He paused and looked at Sofia before continuing. ‘The Jewish sages tell us that the whole of the Torah, the entirety of the first five books of the Bible, is the name of God. With such a name, they ask, how much more is God? The fathers of the church tell us that God is mystery and unknowable. God himself in Scripture tells us, “My ways are not your ways and my thoughts are not your thoughts.”‘
“The noise of the forest was quieting now. Siesta was the rule in the heat of midday, when three suns’ aggregate light drove many animals to shelter. They were all, priests and lay, tired and hot, and wanted Marc to finish. But Marc waited until Anne lifted her eyes to his. ‘It is the human condition to ask questions like Anne’s last night and to receive no plain answers,’ he said. ‘Perhaps this is because we can’t understand the answers, because we are incapable of knowing God’s ways and God’s thoughts. We are, after all, only very clever tailless primates, doing the best we can, but limited. Perhaps we must all own up to being agnostic, unable to know the unknowable.’
“Marc continued, ‘The Jewish sages also tell us that God dances when his children defeat him in argument, when they stand on their feet and use their minds. So questions like Anne’s are worth asking. To ask them is a very fine kind of animal behavior. If we keep demanding that God yield up his answers, perhaps some day we will understand them. And then we will be something more than clever apes, and we shall dance with God.’”
From Mary Doria Russell’s The Sparrow
LENT: Week five, Friday – How the light gets in
Ring the bells that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering
there is a crack in everything
That’s how the light gets in.
– Leonard Cohen, Anthem
“While today the word humility may connote a placid servility in the face of mistreatment, its Latin origins suggest strength and fertility. The word comes from hummus, as in “earth.” A humble person is one who accepts the paradox of being both “great and small” and does not discount that hope which Kierkegaard terms “possibility.”We may look to physicians or therapists when our lives go off track, or we may pray the psalms, or seek solace in a favorite novel. But in a sense we are all seeking the same thing. We want to prepare a good soil in which grace can grow; we want to regard the cracks and fissures in ourselves with fresh eyes, so that they might be revealed not merely as the cause or the symptom of our misery but also as places where the light of promise shines through.”
- Kathleen Norris in Acedia and Me: A Marriage, Monks, and a Writer’s Life
