There is no week of the year more replete with rituals than Holy Week. Rituals are not routines, even when we have memorized the gestures and words. When ritual is done well—and that’s why lectors and singers practice—it helps us transcend our limits in sensing God’s presence. Ritual also strengthens community in its praise, hopes, sorrows. Although the actions are done over and over, the gestures are what it means to be a baptized Catholic. When spouses kiss, it’s not routine. In the same way, our gestures of Sign of the Cross, genuflection, bowing, reciting, singing are not routine; they are transformative as they shape and deepen our spiritual lives. We transcend our capacity to know God’s unending love for us through the gift of simple signs and saving responses and song. Give your full attention to these rituals that connect us to God and one another.
Have you checked your Lentometer lately? You know, the gauge indicating the number of good deeds, the depth of your prayer, and the difficulty of your fasting throughout the 40-day season. If you’re reading this toward the end of March and feel good about your Lenten practices, congratulations! If you feel the Lentometer shows you were a bit lax, that’s OK. It’s OK??? Well, we’re in the home stretch to Easter. Holy Week is the first week of April. Our following of Christ takes a different path. While prayer, fasting, and almsgiving are fine 365 days of the year, they are not the prime focus of Holy Week. The week beginning with Palm Sunday moves the focus from ourselves and our Lenten practices to our Crucified and Risen Lord. This holiest of weeks has little to do with refraining from eating Easter candy early. We focus on the redeeming acts of Jesus Christ: his passion, death, resurrection. The liturgical services are very rich in meaning, ritual, and symbol. You don’t want to miss any of them. Where else would you want to be on Holy Thursday, Good Friday, and the Easter Vigil? Your presence at the services, walking the Via Crucis with your Master, is the best way to pray and the best way to love.
The crew team at Notre Dame Academy in Toledo achieved a record for rowing a stationary rowing machine for the greatest number of hours ever recorded. It may be a long time before their record is broken, because they rowed 40 more hours beyond the previous record. While I know nothing about rowing, I know an Egyptian proverb that goes like this: “The rower reaches the shore partly by pulling, partly by letting go.” When we try to achieve a goal, we may “row, row, row our boat,” but that’s hardly “gently down the stream” as the song claims. Perhaps our goals and achievement depend a bit more on letting go. Dogged determination has its place—and certainly helped the crew achieve its goal—but sometimes letting go and traveling “merrily, merrily, merrily” may let us see that “life is but a dream.”
As we journey this Lent to the Easter shore, we may be advised to pull back a little, rest our good works and sacrifices, and gently turn toward prayer, spiritual reading, and reflection.
At this point in Lent we read about the blind man whom Jesus cured. The blind man’s neighbors assumed the parents must have been sinners that God punished their son with blindness. Jesus claimed, “Not true.” And then the Pharisees “proved” Jesus was a sinner, because he cured on the sabbath. Two innocent people were accused because of others’ assumptions, those of the Pharisees blinded to reality by seeing only what they wanted to see.
I can assume many things, but are they reality? Am I blinded because I don’t know the back story? It may look as if people are lazy, inconsiderate, greedy. But before I catch myself judging, I remind myself there may be a back story. Maybe the person has a health issue, an urgent need, a higher value than what I imagine. As I push my judging attitude aside to give room for kind thoughts, I hear Jesus say to the believing blind man: “I came into this world for judgment, so that those who do not see might see, and those who do see might become blind” (Jn. 9:39).
Perhaps we may consider God to be like a Big Banker in the Sky. You know, make sure we have a lot of revenue for our afterlife. And Lent is a good time to increase our heavenly bank account with more church attendance, fasting and almsgiving. All this is well and good. After all Jesus said, “Make your practice to store up heavenly treasure” (Mt. 6:20). Great advice! But Jesus gives many other pieces of advice both stated and lived. Jesus’ relationship to his Father was one of “Not my will, but yours be done” (Lk 22:42). From his Incarnation and birth to his passion and death, Jesus didn’t seem intent on storing up. Instead, he was always giving away. Cynthia Bourgeault writes, “It was not love stored up but loved utterly poured out that opened the gates to the Kingdom of heaven.”
Recently I heard a talk from a parishioner. Let me share it.
Nick loved skydiving. He and his buddies would regularly take the jump. Planning to join his buddies for their usual thrill, Nick decided not to participate when his father told him this story: “Even though I am a Jehovah Witness, Mary appeared to me. She said I had to tell my son that he should not go up in the plane. He should not skydive as planned. To make sure the message would be believed, I traveled across a couple states to visit my son.” Believing that his father had actually seen the Blessed Virgin, Nick complied with his father’s wishes. On the day of the intended skydiving, Nick heard on the radio that there was a terrible accident at the place where he and his buddies decided to meet. The three buddies enjoyed their usual thrill. The fourth man, who had taken Nick’s place, was given Nick’s parachute. The parachute did not open.
Rachel Held Evans said, “God needed women for survival. Before Jesus fed us with the bread and wine, the body and the blood, Jesus himself needed to be fed, by a woman. He needed a woman to say, ‘This is my body, given for you.’”
Lent has always been a baptismal season, for example, we are reminded to pray for those who will be baptized at the Easter Vigil. But it is also a season to remember that we continue to live our baptismal promises made long ago. Conversion is on-going; deepening our faith is a perennial project, a daily task. That’s true for the catechumens and just as true for us who were baptized as infants. At baptism we heard “Receive the light of Christ.” Have we kept the flame burning? Are we lights leading the way to Christ? Are we living our baptismal commitment? Good questions for Lenten meditations.
Feeling separated from others is an emotion and thought that can consume us. But we need to keep remembering that we are in communion. Even when we feel that we are not part of a community (church, employment, neighborhood, relationships), we are still in communion. There is no way not to be in communion. Communion is the way of our universe. Communion is the way of our God. We are never a branch cut off from the vine. We are one body, the Body of Christ. Whether we realize it or not, the prayers and actions—even just the existence—of others impact us. In the same way, whatever we do, whatever we are, links us to the human family. Spend a few moments today enjoying the presence of your millions of unseen brothers and sisters.
Have you made your Lenten resolutions? Perhaps you are considering extra prayer and sacrifices of self-denial. Wonderful! But make sure the extra prayer and penance aren’t just for us ourselves. Lent is not a self-improvement challenge. Rather much in Lent is an urgent life-or-death call to community, to systemic conversion. Giving up desserts is personal and good. But do we pay a bit extra to buy produce from farmers who use methods that protect the planet’s ecosystem? Are we donating to organizations that provide clean water? Limiting favorite recreational activities is personal and good. But do we give the equivalent time to service—maybe teaching a youngster your athletic skill or baking desserts for a hospitality kitchen, or gathering the neighborhood to help a particular neighbor in need, or studying a political or social issue? We have forty days to choose best practices for the whole human community, not just for ourselves.