Rethinking Lent This Year (Again)

Last year I wrote an article called Rethinking Lent This Year. I was inspired by the fact that I realized my own sacrifices were on autopilot and I didn’t even know why I was giving up what I was giving up. More importantly, could I add something? The thought of it all!

Anyway, I polled a bunch of people via email and got some great responses. Please read if you are rethinking your Lent; have fallen off the band wagon already; are feeling competitive with yourself or others (just kidding - don’t do that - it’s very much opposite the spirit of Lent); or want to learn something new. I know I did as I wrote it.

For example, one thing I come back to again this year is the decision to enjoy the thing on Sunday which one has given up. Obvious examples: chocolate, beer, wine, donuts, Netflix. As someone explained it to me, there are a few reasons for this. One is that it keeps you humbled. If you think you are just a’cruisin’ to Lent giving up this and that of your own power, to have it reintroduced - and then removed again the following day - can show you how dependent on God you are, actually. And yes, it takes God’s grace to keep me from snorfling seven handfuls of chocolate almonds from my desk drawer each day.

I think there’s another layer of humility, too, which is that if you are giving up all these fatty things you may end up feeling both svelte and smug. That’s not the point of Lent! Stop it! Go eat a donut and remember your sins.

Okay, so you’re probably wondering what I’ve given up. Last year I decided not to really give up anything because I had not been partaking of much alcohol or sweets, anyway. I prayed over some particular intentions, and I also wrote letters to friends with a bit of scripture that fit the season and in which I found a lot of meaning. That was Sirach 35:1-11. I was thinking a lot about relationships. It was a very powerful Lent.

This year, I have indeed been enjoying things like wine and so I have given that up, and all sweets. Also no social media at home/after work. More prayer intentions. I have a card I took from the back of St. Matthew’s with the pictures of all the seminarians in the Archdiocese, and I am praying for them. Writing letters again, and including a poem this time. I will share the poem later; don’t want to ruin the surprise for my friends who read this. I will be writing fewer letters, though.

But overall I am - resting. Resting in God. Remembering that indeed I am from dust and to dust I shall return. Trying slowness, patience, forgiveness, hope. Taking a good, hard look at my relationship with God. Wondering what it means to be helpless before God. Wondering how it is that Jesus himself understands helplessness. I will be revisiting the third week of the Spiritual Exercises.

“I ask for what I desire. Here it is what is proper for the Passion: sorrow with Christ in sorrow; a broken spirit with Christ so broken; tears; and interior suffering because of the great suffering which Christ endured for me” (SE 203).

Finding Jesus in Lent

Kathryn Jean Lopez wrote a very good thing about the Jean Vanier revelations for Angelus:

Finding Jesus in Lent

It is interesting, because she raises two thoughts I had immediately. The first is:

“I can’t trust anyone, can I? I can’t even trust my own judgment? How can I ever know if someone is holy? “

Then also that, “I don’t think it is any coincidence that we learned about Vanier just before Lent.”

It reminded me of how the Cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris caught on fire at the beginning of Holy Week last year. It was tragic and heart-rending as we entered a week focused on death and suffering. I don’t think that’s why either of these things happened, but that it is all right to find spiritual meaning in something that seems, at best, senseless. I think it is human to do so, actually.

So, Lent is here, as Lopez notes. I attended Ash Wednesday Mass at 8 am at the Cathedral and Fr. Conrad Murphy said that Lent is a time to “rend your heart and return to the Lord.” This was also in the first reading. My heart is rent, how about yours?

Truth, Grief and Mourning

Friends,

Yesterday the news broke that L’Arche’s founder, Jean Vanier - revered during his time by many, including myself, as a “living saint” - was not quite what he seemed. Specifically, he was guilty, over decades, of covering up and potentially enabling the sexual and spiritual abuse of adult women without disabilities in community by his “spiritual father,” Pere Thomas Phillippe. More importantly, though, Vanier was himself the perpetrator of spiritual, emotional and sexual abuse against at least 6 adult women without disabilities, including several assistants and even one consecrated religious sister. Here is L’Arche USA’s statement on the matter.

To say this news is devastating is an understatement. As I woke and learned the truth - mostly through friends reaching out, followed by reading everything I could online - all I could do is sit back and cry and wonder how it even makes sense. How can one reconcile the genuine reality that what Jean founded - L’Arche, a place of healing, belonging and welcome - could be tied to this darkness? How do we keep one and throw out the other? How could someone who championed the weak and oppressed actually use his position of power to prey on the weak? What, then, even is real within L’Arche?

I thought Catholic News Agency Editor in Chief JD FLynn - whose son is named for Vanier, and who has adopted two children with disability - did a great job of stating something at the heart of this:

“I think part of the reason we look to holy people is b/c they seem like confirmation that the proposition of the Gospel is possible. When we discover their hidden wicked deeds, we wonder if we can be set free of our own wickedness. Holiness is possible in Christ. But hard.”

Indeed, if there is something wicked at the heart of L’Arche, which I thought was through and through full of light, how is there any hope for me to live up to the promise of the Gospel, and of what God calls me to be and do? Who, after all of this, can I - or any of us - trust?

Tomorrow night a few of us are getting together to discuss, process and understand how to move forward. I am aching for that time, to be with what has become my family.

Ultimately Vanier’s words - his writing, the philosophy, the spirituality - were very much a part of what drew me into 'L’Arche. But I realize they have not been the things that have kept me there. What has kept me there have been the relationships, especially with core members - with Laurie and Charles and Bruce and all the assistants who have welcomed me like family. It has been the acceptance, and the finding of a place where I and my gifts are recognized and needed. But ultimately where it matters more to be, rather than to do. None of that changes, with this news.