The Compassion of Lent

On Wednesday we began Lent. There were the words we hear every day on this year about repentance, fasting, almsgiving and prayer. Ashes were distributed and each of us was left with her own thoughts as we again entered this season.

Once again I listened and felt that I wasn’t sure I really understood Lent or perhaps more accurately I felt that I wasn’t feeling what I should feel. I’m never sure what I should give up, I struggle to name my repentance, I feel guilty that I will probably fail in my intention to be a better person.

All these thoughts went through my head in a strange sort of Ash Wednesday déjà vu. But suddenly another word came into my head in a startling instant. Compassion.

It was a moment when I began to look at Lent not from my point of view but from God’s. I realized Lent isn’t about me, either my good intentions or my guilt. Lent is about God’s deep compassion for us, God’s desire for our wholeness and healing.
What God feels for us is not a desire for feats of ascetic discipline or even an acutely attuned sense of guilt and repentance. God looks at each one of us with a deep, encompassing, all pervading sense of compassion. The guilt, the resolution, contrition and even the confession of the lack of these feelings aren’t what God cares about. God simply reaches out and whispers, “quiet, listen, do you know how much I care about you?”

Perhaps we work on our determination to keep our resolutions, wallow in guilt, escape into holy reading because all of these are easier than simply surrendering into the overwhelming reality of God’s compassionate love for us. The resolutions, guilt and pious actions all allow us to remain in control, to determine how we will relate to God. And so we can continue to feed our secret, pervasive sense of self-determination.

Ultimately I suspect Lent is both much easier and much harder than we usually make it with our well-intentioned resolutions. Lent is easier if it is really about God’s compassion for us rather than our ascetic strivings. But the paradox is that letting go into the reality of God’s love can make the difficulty of our resolutions look like a walk in the park. Being enfolded in compassion requires a profound level of trust, a level of difficulty that dwarfs our resolutions to give up chocolate or coffee for a few weeks. Lent is a call not to focus on our own strivings but to let go into the reality of God’s deep longing for us.

The poet T.S. Eliot once said: “mankind cannot bear too much reality.” But perhaps that is what Lent is all about, facing the reality of God’s compassion and the paradox of how difficult that can be. And so Lent begins again and with it God’s ever open invitation.

What Constitutes Holiness?

What makes a person holy? Hopefully all of us are striving for holiness, hard at work on our spiritual way, becoming more Christ-like as we grow in our faith. But we also know that certain people are clearly farther along on the journey toward holiness. The saints are obvious examples of people who have led transformed lives, their witness has been formally affirmed by the Church. But we also know ordinary people whom we recognize as having achieved what Benedict would call the heights of humility.

In our community one such holy person has just died. Those of you who knew her won’t be surprised to hear Sr. Wilma Schlangen described as such a person. Of course if anyone had told her that she was holy she would probably say “Oh no!” in her inimitable Minnesota accent. But for the many people whose lives she touched there was something very special, very holy about Wilma.

Sr. Wilma had an ability to make everyone feel special. So many people came through her old kitchen and were warmly embraced, accepted and loved. Each person was made to feel absolutely unique. Many visitors would encounter Wilma in the course of a few days or even a few hours and feel like they had just met a friend for life. I never had the heart to tell any of them that Wilma made everyone feel that way and that she may not remember them because she met so many people and was so present to each one.

Perhaps the key to Wilma’s holiness, or any other exceptional person, is that God’s light shines through them exactly as they are with all their limitations. Holiness does not mean perfection, a lack of flaws, a person who is “too good to be true;” holiness is a quality that simply means that the rough edges have been smoothed out, they haven’t been eliminated.

Like all of us Wilma had her edges. In her 94 years Sr. Wilma walked a path of holiness through work. She worked incredibly hard, set herself incredibly high standards and expected other people to meet those standards. Many people shared memories of working with her in the kitchen and having her exclaim “oh, you’re not going to use that pot are you?” Many more people came through the old kitchen assuming that they already knew how to string beans, sort raspberries, crack walnuts or any one of multiple tasks, only to be very clearly told by Wilma exactly what they were doing wrong.

But Sr. Wilma was also a Benedictine in whom there was no guile. She was absolutely honest in all her interactions whether that was making someone feel absolutely loved and welcome or telling them they were cutting apples all wrong or saying with great concern “you have gained weight haven’t you?” But whatever she said there was only truth, and even if you were a disaster in the kitchen or garden you knew that Wilma still loved you.

Perhaps holiness is about having experienced God’s love without reservation, having come, through long years and perhaps difficult experience, to the place where the reality of God’s unconditional embrace is the clearest reality. In her life Wilma knew suffering, rejection, doubt. She struggled with what it meant to be a good religious, a good community member. But by the time she died, tired and ready to go “home,” she also knew that God’s light shone through her, not as a reward for her many years of hard work, but as the reality of God’s free gift of love. The holiness that Wilma manifest for all of us was that light, that love that simply radiated from her deepest being.

Wilma has completed her journey toward holiness. For those of us that come after her Wilma has given us the gift of seeing that holiness isn’t a denial of our fallible humanity but it is a celebration and transformation of our deepest selves. To be holy is to rejoice that we have been give the gift of being made in the image of God and that on the journey of life we become ever more like the God whose image we share. And so, with every raspberry we pick, with every person we meet and love, we remember Wilma, and know as she did, that we are embraced and loved by God just as we are.

Writing Our Communities Psalm

I have to confess I have always thought that the Psalmist was a bit of a drama queen. The Psalms always seem a little "over the top," heavy on hyperbole and drama. Perhaps it is just because I come from a culture that tends to value the "stiff upper lip" approach to life's problems that the Psalms have always seemed rather exaggerated.

Recently though I've had a new insight into the nature of the Psalms. In a class I'm taking we were given an assignment to write our own Psalm. We were supposed to do a "lament" Psalm and make sure it included the standard elements of a Psalm: an invocation of God, a complaint, a petition and a vow to praise.

I decided to write a Psalm that reflected the fears of our community, the reality that like most religious communities we have fewer, older members and our future is not certain. The process of expressing our "lament" in this way was eye-opening. I tried to make my psalm as "over the top" as psalms usually are. It was an exaggerated plea for help painting a dire picture of our situation. And then at the end, like all Psalms, I included a vow to praise God no matter what may happen.

The result was very interesting. By the time I finished my deeply pessimistic view of our situation and ended with a vow that nothing will shake our faith, I felt different. Somehow expressing deep worries, articulating the fear we often feel but often don't state out loud, was very liberating. By being rather melodramatic and exaggerated in voicing the fear it becomes less powerful. By claiming the "vow to praise," stating to God that nothing will shake our faith and knowledge of God's presence, I felt deeply energized and renewed. No matter what the future may hold God is present in our midst, upholding and guiding us.

So, the Psalmist may have been a drama queen, but it is a transformative drama!

A Communal Lament

O God why have you abandoned us?
Left us crushed and desolate in this place of sorrow?
Answer God, listen to our plea,
attend to the sound of our cry.
Are you not a God of mercy,
a God who gives life to those who revere your name?

For you have abandoned us and broken us,
left us without hope or promise.
Respond now, raise your holy arm,
look upon us and save us.
For our community is dying,
our life blood poured out like water.

We stagger like a lion's prey,
daily we are diminished, we shrink and stumble.
We waste away like a land without water,
like animals in a drought we thirst for the waters of life.
In diminishing choirs we struggle to sing your praise,
in the dryness of prayer we crave your presence.

We remember the days long past,
we long for the splendor we once knew,
how we would fill the chapel with voices of praise,
in ranks strong and overflowing we sang hymns which are your due.
We were a beacon of hope to all who knew us,
the light of our faith shown in the darkness.

Though darkness may fall and despair overcome us,
still we will sing your praise O God.
Though none may enter and we sleep in the grave,
on our lips will be songs as we close our doors.
In dying breaths we will remember your name,
for in your praise alone is our life.

Praying Together

Over Christmas I tried recording some of our common prayer in order to try posting it on the web. What surprised me the most was how good we sounded. Well, we sounded better after I made sure that I didn’t sing while I recorded the community singing. But despite the occasional cough and background noise we were remarkably clear and together. No one would mistake us for the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, but for an average bunch of women trying to sing together we weren’t bad. It also made me think about what it means for us to pray together as a community.

Most people think of prayer as a solitary activity but for Benedictines prayer is a community practice. Our communal prayer shapes, molds and transforms us from a collection of individuals who happen to pray together into a community united in heart and mind through prayer.

In our American society we tend to value the individual above all else. We pride ourselves on being independent and self-reliant. Americans celebrate the myth of the rugged individual single-handedly conquering all odds. Community is often an afterthought, working together is not as prized as going it alone.

But for Benedictines the heart of our way of life is community and perhaps nowhere is this expressed more clearly than in our practice of prayer. In our monastery we gather morning and evening to celebrate the divine office, the ancient prayer practice of psalms, hymns, readings and blessings.

Common prayer is truly a practice. We practice day after day, month after month, year after year. We practice because we hope that through the long work of years we will no longer be a collection of individuals who happen to be praying at the same time and place but we will become one body at prayer.

Through the unity of our prayer we express our unity as a community, a small manifestation of the greater Body of Christ. In praying together each of us has to put the needs of the whole community first. The best singers have to make sure they are not standing out and trying too hard to lead the rest of us. Those of us who are not natural singers have to try hard to listen and blend in as well as we can. All of us have to learn to be patient and forgiving with those who are not only musically impaired but also rather loud and oblivious about their impairment.

All aspects of the prayer encourage us to become one heart, one mind. We all strive to come to chapel when the bell rings, dropping what we are doing and making the common prayer a priority. We come and sit in silence, becoming present to what will happen. When the clock chimes we rise as one and the leader lights the candle to signal the beginning of prayer. We bow in unison at certain points and remain seated for a while even after prayer is finished.

Most of the unity in prayer is external. Even when we sing and pray in unison our minds may be busy wool gathering in complex and unique fantasies. But the discipline slowly, gradually and with great effort leads to transformation. Through practice, through daily, small exercises of becoming one community in prayer we are slowly transformed. In prayer, in the rest of community life we grow into the reality that we not simply isolated individuals who happen to live with others but through the course of our life together we are transformed into a community, into one body knit together in Christ, struggling to love as we have been first loved by God.