Every Journey - Lent I

Image: Jon Tyson/Unsplash

Every journey starts with a first step. Here we are just past Quadragesima Sunday, the first Sunday of Lent, reminding us of our forty-day Lenten trek of fervent prayer, fasting and almsgiving until Good Friday.

An unusual first step for me was to attend my first Alcoholics Anonymous meeting. No, I am not an alcoholic, but I was honoured to attend as a guest of someone who was receiving his 1-year medallion of sobriety.

AA Sobriety chips

Perhaps 30 people were in attendance announcing anywhere from several days up to 55 years of sobriety. The speaker of the evening recounted, with humour and tears, her downward spiral into addiction then her inspiring journey to sobriety. To say I was moved is a gross understatement. Her acknowledging of her current dependence on God (her higher power), her family of origin and her AA family was inspiring. To see that support in action over the evening will continue to be a blessing for me. To hold the hand of a stranger with 50 year sobriety as we prayed the Lord’s prayer was a gift. Prayer, almsgiving, and fasting were all elements of the meeting. The coffee was very welcome!

As we begin Lent, we often set goals for ourselves: giving up candy or cigarettes OR praying more OR not gossiping etc.  At AA I learned that to keep coming back is one key to success even when we misstep. Forty days is long!

Let’s share our journey and offer support to those we love and those who love us and maybe even those who don’t know but have wisdom we need to hear.

-Maureen Condon, CSJ Associate

A Different Approach to Lenten Almsgiving

Image: Unsplash/Mayur Gala

There are three traditional Lenten mainstays: prayer, fasting and almsgiving. Almsgiving, one of the three, usually translates into extending charity, or showing God’s kindness and compassion to our neighbour. It is often but not necessarily giving in the form of financial aid or material goods.  

I awoke one morning thinking of the two words: almsgiving and compassion. My early morning thought sparked this blog.

One of the ways we might focus on almsgiving during the Lenten season is by reflecting more intently on the guidelines for living Gospel compassionate action. The Corporal Works or Acts of Mercy provide an excellent roadmap for displaying God’s kindness and mercy in the actions of our daily lives.

Matthew 25: 35-40 provides us with the pattern for Christian living given by Jesus:

I was hungry and you fed me,
I was thirsty, and you gave me a drink,
I was homeless, and you gave me a room,
I was shivering, and you gave me clothes,
I was sick, and you stopped to visit,
I was in prison, and you came to me.

I read in a church bulletin a revised wording of the Corporal Acts of Mercy composed by Barbara Molinari Quinby, MPS. which turn words into action:

• Share what you have with those who need it, down the street or around the world.

• Share your joy and hope with those whose lives are dry and lonely, and those who are literally without water. 

• Stand up for those who are weak and vulnerable. 

• Advocate for those whose voices are not heard.

• Help prisoners and those who are confined due to fear, illness, or sadness.

• Make everyone welcome in your heart. Give people simple, decent places to lay their heads.

• Be with people who need you. 

• Love and respect the person who has died.

This Lent, why not extend the scope of almsgiving to incorporate the Works of Mercy? John’s words point the way, “Let us love, not in word or speech, but in truth and action.“ 1 John 3:18

-Sister Nancy Wales, CSJ

The Seven Corporal Works of Mercy | Artist Studio of David Teniers the younger | c.1642-3

This painting seemingly depicts a crowded genre scene in a Dutch village, but there is more to it than meets the eye. The various groups of figures composing the scene symbolically illustrate the seven corporal acts of mercy: to feed the hungry, to give drink to the thirsty, to clothe the naked, to give shelter to travellers, to visit the sick, to visit the imprisoned, and to bury the dead. This composition is known in several versions.

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Credits: Matthew 25:33-40; 1 John 3:18 - Bible Gateway

Corporal Works of Mercy - Barbara Molinari Quinby, MPS, a coordinator of Social Justice Ministries at Sacred Heart Cathedral, in Raleigh, NC

Fifth Sunday of Lent

Fifth Sunday of Lent

“I am going to open your graves, and bring you up from your graves, O my people; …I will put my Spirit within you, and you shall live…” Ezek. 37: 12,14.

 “If the Spirit of God who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in you, he who raised Christ from the dead will give life to your mortal bodies also through his Spirit that dwells in you.” Romans 8:11

 “I am the Resurrection and the Life.  Whoever believes in me, even though they die, will live, and everyone who lives and believes in me will never die.”  John 11: 25-26

Image: Unsplash

The message for this 5th Sunday of Lent holds up to us two promises: the coming of the indwelling, life-giving Spirit, and the eternal life that Spirit assures.  In the first reading, Ezekiel prophesies both the future gift of the Spirit and the resurrection to come.  Paul speaks to the early Christians living that promise in their now reality and assuring them of the life to come.  Then Jesus, raising his friend Lazarus from the dead, demonstrates the truth of his power over death, and speaks clearly that He is the Resurrection, and that all who live in him, will never die. 

Image: Unsplash/Paul Keiffer

We have heard and read these passages so often that sometimes they don’t really sink in.  Like Martha, we know and believe that we will “rise again at the resurrection on the last day”.  But do we realize that the life we will experience when that day comes is not a new life, to be given to us as a reward for living a good life here.  It is, in truth, the fullness of the very life we are living NOW, the life of the Godhead received at our Baptism.  The miracle is that by God’s free, deliberate, and loving gift, God infused the very life of the Trinity into us when, in the waters of Baptism, we were buried with Christ and rose to be a totally new kind of human.  We are now not just the wonderful stardust of the evolutionary process, but an even more amazing creature: I dare to say, the “God-dust” of a new creation, a human imbued with the very life of the Godhead.  That’s a bigger big bang than the first one! So, all our lives, from our Baptism on, our “graves are being opened” and we are rising from the dead by the power of the Spirit who has been given to us.  However, like Lazarus when he first came out of the tomb, we are alive, and yet we are still “bound” by the limits of our mortality and need to be unbound and “let go” in order to live this new life to the full.  Little by little we need to allow God and life to unbind us, to set us free and thus to reveal the wonder of the new creation that we are.  

Image: Unsplash/Pisit Heng

So, I ask: What is the unbinding that is taking place in my life this lent?  Could it be letting go of resentments?  Changing attitudes of discrimination, judgment, or non-inclusion? Seeking comfort or pleasure a little less avidly? or reaching out to unbind someone else who needs to be set free?  Whatever that unbinding might be, I invite Jesus, to come and awaken me.  Show me where I am asleep, still bound, or not letting go.  Come Jesus, call out to me, as you did to Lazarus, “come out”, so that I may live more fully the Trinitarian life planted in me at my Baptism so long ago.   

-Sister Mary Diesbourg, CSJ

Give Us Eyes to See You Clearly

In this Sunday’s longer version of the reading from John’s gospel, we witness a series of dramatic interchanges. As Jesus walks along, he takes notice of the blind man who will play a central part in the upcoming scenes to follow.

Jesus ’disciples question  who bore the responsibility for the man’s blindness. There soon becomes a juxtaposition between two differing realities, one of physical blindness and the other of inner blindness. As Jesus refutes the disciples’ assertions, he underscores their blindness, their inability to see and understand God’s ways. Ways not of retribution but ways of divine revelation.

In contrast to other reported miracles, it is Jesus, the healer who is the initiator rather than the one seeking to be cured. The focus is on the blind man, yet he remains nameless. I find myself wondering, was the omission of his name unintentional or by purposeful design?  Was the gospel writer, John, extending an opportunity to become more than merely a spectator?

If we stepped into the developing scene as the one born blind, what might we experience?

How might we hear the disciples question Jesus about our blindness? What might we make of Jesus’ self-identification, “I am the light of the world” as one unable to see light?

How might we sense Jesus’ presence as he reaches down and places the moist mud on our eyes?

What might be our experience of being able to see?

How might we feel ourselves reacting to our neighbours and the Pharisees numerous questions? Would we struggle amid our own wonderment to tell others all that had happened?

On this “Rejoice” Sunday of Lent, may the God of Goodness give us eyes to see what good we have not yet noticed in ourselves and others.

-Sr. Nancy Wales, CSJ

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Image: Unsplash/Guillermo

Lent 3 - Jesus is Thirsty

JESUS IS THIRSTY (John: 4:1-42)

Image: Unsplash/Jimmy Chang

Jesus and his disciples are leaving Judea where Jesus had turned water into wine at the wedding feast in Cana, and where he made a lot of enemies by cleansing the temple of its money-changers, and where John the Baptist had been baptizing with water.  Jesus’ followers were also baptizing with water. 

While these events may not have occurred simultaneously in John’s Gospel, we can be sure that Jesus was tired and thirsty when he and his disciples reached Jacob’s well in the land of Samaria on their way to Galilee.

“Will you give me a drink?” Jesus said to the Samaritan woman.  She obviously had to be asked and did not anticipate that here was a thirsty man waiting for a helping hand to relieve his thirst.  She saw only a Jewish man who would reject, with contempt, a Samaritan woman. 

Surprise!  Jesus uses his thirst to reveal his weakness and invites this woman at the well to thirst for water to drink so that she will never be thirsty again.  As we continue to read Chapter 4 in John’s Gospel we see that many Samaritans in the town believed in Jesus on the strength of the woman’s word of testimony: “He told me everything I ever did.” 

Jesus’ thirst at the well eventually transformed the entire town into “thirsty” believers;  Jesus really is, “the Savior of the world”.

-Sister Elaine Cole, CSJ