A JOURNEY THROUGH LENT - SPEAK LORD, YOUR SERVANT IS LISTENING

We are a little late in putting up our Lenten reflections but we trust that they may still be helpful for those who read this blog.  We are united with the whole Church as we journey through this Lenten season towards Easter..

It is that time again, LENT. Like anyone who is bothering to read this blog I am thinking about what I should do for Lent this year. The thought occurs to me that if I rephrase the question I might come up with a more fruitful answer. So I ask myself what do I want Lent to do for me? By the time Easter arrives what would I like to be different about me? How can I make that happen?

The season of Lent is God’s gift to us to renew our lives in holiness. By the end of Lent I want to be more aware of God’s love for me and in response to that love to love God more and to reveal his love to others.

The word Lent comes from an old English word lencten meaning ‘springtime’. Spring cleaning is a term we are all familiar with. Once the days begin to lengthen and get brighter we get an itch to empty cupboards and wash curtains, to get into corners where dust, grime and dirt may have gathered without our noticing it during the dark days of winter. This image might not be very vivid in our time when electricity provides us with light twenty four hours a day . But think back to a time of candle light and gas lamps. Light that focused on one area and left the rest in shadow and it becomes quite a powerful image for the season of Lent. There is so much one does not see in the dark. What a fail-safe programme for Lent- to spend time allowing CHRIST OUR LIGHT to light up all that is hidden in the dark corners of our hearts, so that we may remove the accumulation of sin  that we may not have been even aware of. ‘Purify me then I shall be clean, wash me I shall be whiter than snow’ is the clarion call of Lent as we encounter ourselves. Jesus is our Saviour. During Lent we learn how much we are in need of Him.

Our parents and grandparents depending on our age, observed Lent  with rigorous physical penances and severe austere fasting from food. In some respects we seem to be getting off lightly. But while Vatican 11 eased the severe bodily discipline, it was in order to change our focus during Lent, encouraging us to make it ‘a period of closer attention to the Word of God and more ardent prayer’.

I can think of no more powerful programme for Lent than to make a commitment to spend time each day reflecting on the Word of God, in the readings at Mass, allowing God to speak to us of his love and mercy and bringing his Word to bear on our lives.

I invite you to join with us in being faithful to this commitment. Let us journey together, supporting one another with prayer.

Mary, temple of the Trinity, Mother of the Word made flesh, teach us how to ponder the Word in our hearts and to respond as you did, ‘Be it done unto me according to you will’.

ASH WEDNESDAY

READINGS: Joel 2:12-18, Psalm 50, 2Cor 5:20-6:2, Matthew 6:1-6,16-18

Turn to the Lord again, for he is all tenderness and compassions slow to anger, rich in graciousness and ready to relent.

Two little words in the first reading from the prophet Joel became the focus of my reflection, again and ready. ‘Turn to the Lord again’. God knows we have wandered off. There is no need for us to be afraid. That little word assures us that he is aware of our predicament. No matter how often we have strayed or where we have strayed to, he is inviting us back yet again. He welcomes us, encourages us. “I’m here waiting, ready to relent, watching for your return. My heart is full of tenderness and compassion. Come my beloved, come.”

Who could not respond to someone who makes it so easy for us to return? While we are still a long way off, He sees us. I picture Him coming, rushing out to meet me with outstretched arms, embracing me and then putting his arm across my shoulder and leading back into His House. I have returned home.

Now I am going to remain in his company, allowing Him to speak to me of His Love. 

Thursday after Ash Wednesday.

Readings: Deut. 30:15-20, ps.1, Luke 9:22-25

Happy indeed is the one

whose delight is the Law of the Lord

 and who ponders his law day and night.

He is like a tree that is planted

beside flowing water

that yields its fruit in due season

and whose leaves will never fade

The Gospel for today speaks of renouncing myself and taking up my Cross. It all sounds a bit daunting. It is easy to feel a certain dread. I want to draw back from the inevitable cost. This Word seems more death dealing than life giving. My death to myself and my comforts.  I resist.

 But then I remember my prayer time yesterday, and God’s longing for my return to Him and I think not of what I am giving up but of Who I am giving it up for. I am  being asked to let go of my way in order to remain in His company. There will be hard choices, yes, because I am selfish and I need to take on the responsibility of facing myself. Self indulgence, self centrednes, self will,  all these need to be purified but I see Him standing at a fork in the road, beckoning me to take His path, to remain in His presence, to journey with Him. The psalm puts it so beautifully, in choosing Jesus way over my own will, I am choosing happiness and fruitfulness and He will be with me to guard my way. I do not journey alone. Every step on the journey to Calvary is a step nearer to the Resurrection. In each little death the seed of God’s life becomes more deeply rooted in me.

Feast of St Augustine - 28th August

“You have seduced me, Lord, and I have let myself be seduced;
you have overpowered me: you were the stronger.”

(Jer 20:7)

These words from the prophet Jeremiah which we heard this morning at Mass prompted me to reflect on St Augustine whose feast day is to-day but was not celebrated.

Both Jeremiah and Augustine wrote what are known as their ‘confessions’ – accounts which describe their inner struggles and suffering, their loneliness and yearning for God. Their anger, complaints and disappointments betray the heart of a lover. Here I will focus on Augustine.

In his Confessions Augustine gives us a very moving account of his search for God or perhaps more correctly God’s search for him! - which reaches a climax when he exclaims “too late have I loved you, O Beauty so ancient and so new, too late have I loved you.” (10:27)

From his earliest years Augustine had a very sensitive heart, with a great capacity for love but yet was prevented from recognising and accepting God as his true and ultimate joy because as he explains - although “he loved the happy life” and sought after truth he “feared to find it in God’s abode and so fled from it even as he sought it.” (cf 6:11). As Francis Thompson puts it “he feared lest having Him he must have naught beside.” (The Hound of Heaven).

God is a jealous lover and He is not satisfied till we surrender our inmost heart to Him. He is also a patient lover who knows how to wait while at the same time being a persistent lover who does not give up on us! Augustine describes the many ways in which God was secretly at work trying to detach his heart from earthly attractions. He says “Little by little I was drawing closer to you although I did not know it”. During this time Augustine experienced God’s action as a “piercing of the very nerve within the wound of his soul, so that he might leave all things and be converted to God” (cf 6:6).

The turning point came when as he tells us “he entered into his inmost being with God as his helper.” (7:10). We have the key to Augustine’s spirituality when he says “I sought for a way of gaining strength sufficient for me to have joy in You but did not find it until I embraced the Mediator between God and man, the Man Christ Jesus.” (7:18). God’s search for humankind finds its ultimate expression in the humble self-emptying love of Jesus through whom we find our way back to the Father. Our love is but a response to God’s infinite love for us. Once we truly experience His love in the self-emptying of Jesus we are freed to let go of our attachments to sin and creatures and surrender ourselves in humility and obedience to Him who first loved us.

However although the “way of the Saviour had become pleasing” to Augustine he “was still bound by his love of women”. He wanted so much to surrender, yet he feared to let go. (cf 8: 11) until Continence says to him “Why do you stand on yourself and thus stand not at all? Cast yourself on Him. Have no fear. He will not draw back and let you fall. Cast yourself trustfully on him and He will receive you and He will heal you.” Thus he describes his conversion in terms of humility, letting go of his dependence on self and his attachments to creatures and surrendering himself totally to God’s mercy “bending his neck to the mild yoke and his shoulders to the light burden” of Jesus Christ (cf 9:1) and in that moment he exclaims “How sweet did it suddenly become ….things I once feared to lose it was now a joy to put away ….in their stead You entered in sweeter than any pleasure.”

We could imagine that all Augustine’s struggles ended here but in the next chapter he describes his continuing struggles with sin and selfishness - but his hope in the Saviour never wavers. In the face of his “many and great infirmities he will not despair because the Word was made flesh and dwelt among us” (10:43). He is content to be “but a little one but his Father lives forever and his Protector is sufficient for him.” (10:14). Here we have a picture of Augustine as humble and little in the hands of God his Father – secure in His love, detached from creatures and trusting utterly in the Father’s providence. Yet he is not aloof from his brothers and sisters, his fellow citizens and pilgrims; rather in God’s providence he wishes to be of service to them and share with them the love and mercy he has experienced in his own life (10:4).

Augustine could well identify with Jeremiah:

“You have seduced me, Lord, and I have let myself be seduced;
you have overpowered me: you were the stronger.”

(Jer 20:7)

May he intercede on our behalf that we may be truly converted to the Lord and server our sisters and brothers.

Stay at a Sinner's House

CCC 1127: “… As fire transforms into itself everything it touches, so the
Holy Spirit transforms into the divine life whatever is subjected to its power.”

2 Thess 1:11-12
“We pray continually that God will make you worthy of his call, and by his power fulfil all your desires for goodness and complete all that you have been doing through faith; because in this way the name of our Lord Jesus Christ will be glorified in you and you in him, by the grace of our God and the Lord Jesus Christ.”
We are tempted at every moment to do without God, as though it were a sign of weakness that we should be creatures who have need of others and of God to be happy, and to come to be the fullness of what we have been given life to grow to be.
In all our wandering, in all our encounters with others, in all that we achieve and acquire however, there is always something lacking – a little emptiness, a little loneliness, a little missing.
But we are ones who were, and who constantly strive to be – open to the touch of God. All of us who were baptised into the divine life of the Blessed Trinity, have been given this grace, if we would but receive it, welcome it joyfully. When I realise that only God can fill the emptiness, that not the deepest most intimate human love can understand – when this I see, then He will come – He does come – in fact, He is there already.

We are all of us like Zacchaeus – ‘too short’ in our own sight, yet … wanting to come out of ourselves, to reach beyond ourselves, to grow out of what we are at the moment .. into that person that we could be, if only Someone would reach into us and draw us out. Because, on my own, I will never be more or better or more complete that the one I am now, and I am sadly lacking.

But the grace of God in me, His gift of faith and of hope, He has kept alive and active, and by it I have been kept open to Him, and so I ‘know’ Him. He, Jesus, is all I need, the answer to all the loneliness, the emptiness. He speaks and shows me what Way I am to walk, what I can do with His help, who I am in the sight of God – how, in the life of the Blessed Trinity I am caught up in and surrounded on every side by Infinite Love.

The Lord is my light and my help, my strength and my song: His power will fulfil in me all my desires for goodness, complete all I strive to do through faith: His grace.

And if I lay my life, all my desires and loves at His feet – with all that I am – He will be glorified in me and I in Him.
And after all, Lord, if there was only one thing that I could ask of You – it would be that one thing. Take my life, and me with it: all my love that is Yours, all my desires that are all for You – “stay at a sinner’s house” and let Your Name be glorified in me and I in You.