Opening Prayer:
THE SUGGESTED TOPIC FOR THIS PRESENTATION IS A QUESTION: HOW TO KEEP HOLY WEEK AND EASTER HOLY, WHEN SHUT IN, AWAY FROM CHURCH COMMUNITIES?
My first response to this question is from some Zen practice I did years ago. It is this: “Just do it!” There is a way that all that is happening is like nothing any of us have ever gone through before. We cannot really anticipate what these coming next two weeks are going to be like but we can be sure that God is right in the midst of it all and if our hearts are open, we will have no trouble keeping Holy Week and Easter holy as we let Christ’s presence pervade it all.
In making the following remarks I am aware that my situation is unique in that I have more access to liturgical celebrations than most of you. We still have the Divine Office in full and Eucharist each morning just for the community. We are secluded from a number of thing many of you have to deal with.
I’m sure you all have been aware of what’s going on and how it lends itself to keeping this Lenten season. We are seeing countless people making great sacrifices, even of their own lives, for the good of others, especially in hospitals. Work places are strapped for help or shut down and facing limits as to what can be done to maintain their businesses or to assist the jobless. When the governor of New York, Andrew Cuomo was praised for the sacrifices he makes in dealing with crises in New York, he told the public they were nothing compared to those made by doctors and nurses and other hired help in the hospitals dealing with the burden of this epidemic.
In recent years it has often been said that entertainment and the many distractions provided by our culture have prevented many of us from facing the real burdens of life. They have stood in way of our seeing the mystery of the cross as it touches our daily lives. Many of these have been removed in recent weeks as you are well aware.
My Lenten reading this year has been Ronald Rolheiser’s book Wrestling with God that has the subtitle: “Finding hope and meaning in our daily struggles to be human.” I had just written the above paragraph when I sat down to continue my way through this book and ran right into the following. Within a section on “Naming the Struggles with Faith Within Secularity,”p. 167 ff, Rolheiser writes of the major faith struggles of our time, especially in the highly secularized parts of our world and lists some of them. The 5th of those listed is: “The struggle for interiority and prayer inside a culture that in its thirst for information and distraction constitutes a virtual conspiracy against depth and solitude, the eclipse of silence in our world; the struggle to move our eyes beyond our digital screens toward a deeper horizon.”
In some ways the coronavirus pandemic has made us more susceptible to digital screens but at the same time, it has freed us from many distractions by asking us to stay home which means sharing more intensely with family and friends. It is also inviting us, it seems to me, to take more time for interiority and prayer, to be alone for sacred reading and for communion with the living God. One thing I have always appreciated about the Lay Cistercians, is your owning of a deep longing for silence and interior listening in your lives. One of the most effective ways you will keep holy these final days of Lent and then the Easter season is just this, taking time for quiet, centering prayer and pondering the Scriptures during this holy time.
Having been asked to be the principal celebrant at Eucharist yesterday (Tuesday morning) I was again surprised by how the Word of God came alive in new ways as I pondered the texts for the day, namely the Book of Numbers 21:4-9 and then John 8:21-30. I had read the texts a couple times and was going to draw a parallel between Moses telling the people to raise up a saraph on pole so that those looking at it might be healed of harm done them by serpents and the gospel where Jesus says that when he is lifted up, then the people would know who he is as the Son of God.
As I was going to Vigils Tuesday morning it suddenly dawned on me how the serpents in the desert biting and killing the people is exactly what is happening in our time with the spread of the virus. Then the gospel came alive in a new way when I realized how Christ is being lifted up on a cross today in the lives of thousands struggling to breath or dying from the virus. So when asked how to keep this season holy let me suggest, that you let yourselves be aware of all the suffering around you and to do what you can to assist those in need and to stop the spread of this harmful plague. You will do this by being with your sisters and brothers in their pain when possible and certainly by constant prayer for an end of the pandemic.
Pray for the medical scientists that they find a means for undoing the terrible effects this virus can have on human lungs and that they come up with a vaccine that will stop its continual spread. A medication for this could well be something very simple but it needs to be discovered and quickly applied.
There is a whole part of me wondering if God hasn’t allowed all this to happen so that the human family might come together in a much more caring and loving way. Every human person on this planet has been make in the image and likeness of God as St Bernard loved to remind his monks. We have lost our likeness to God because of our selfishness and sins but as we acknowledge these failings and ask for divine assistance, we regain our likeness to God, our original innocence and live a life that prepares us for an eternal dwelling with God.
Lent and refection on all that Christ has suffered on our behalf, has a way of freeing us from our self- centeredness, freeing us from those habits of sin that alienate us from our true selves. We keep this season holy by doing all we can in the ordinariness of our lives out of love for Christ Jesus, letting his love live in us amid the simplest tasks we may have.
The other day in the fudge department something went wrong that caused a mess and I started to get angry and upset but then I realized I was part of the problem. I had failed to communicate well with the person involved. Everything changed when I saw this, allowing me to move out of my anger, disturbance and confusion and continue with what needed to be done. I’m sure this is a familiar scene for many of you as we run into troublesome moments of the day. If we can stop and own our part of the problem, the way through the conflict or disturbance is easily found. For me, this is how we own the mystery of Christ’s dying and rising to new life. It is never far from our everyday lives.
While recently reading Richard Rohr’s The Universal Christ, he speaks of how Buddhists see suffering in their lives. They see it “as the practical and real price for letting go of illusion, false desire, superiority, and separateness. Suffering is also pointed out as the price we pay for not letting go, which might be an even better way to teach about suffering.” The italics are Rohr’s. What the Buddhist have to offer is a valuable insight into the suffering that is built into each of our lives. We will not escape it however hard we try and the more we try the more we become caught in what alienates us from our true selves and causes the suffering.
I don’t know what the future is going to hold but if we allow ourselves to enter fully into it with Christ, it will it lead to a very profound experience of the Resurrection. We will become a new creation even as we pass through this one. I wish each and all of you a profound and blessed coming two weeks.