Churches are empty these days. Even if they open up again soon, the norms of physical distancing will necessarily limit the way that we pray together. No more hugs and handshakes. No more chalices. No more songbooks, holy water fonts, or donuts after Mass. At least, not yet.
A poem from Chris Williams, S.J. opens us up to understanding a little more deeply what it is to love God and to receive God’s love in return. Williams says, “I think a parent knows best / What it means to love someone purely, / Not for what they get from them.”
If the spiritual life is learning to wake up, or to see, even, this would imply a gradual process. Confusion, anxiety, disorientation, and grief are not excluded from the Easter experience.
“What is truth?” Pilate will ask Jesus. And, Jesus will answer with his life. I’ve been thinking this week about a Jesuit brother of mine who has been sitting in jail in Brunswick, Georgia, for the last two years trying to do the same: answer with his life.
I know that from struggle will come new life, because I believe the resurrection is always the new beginning after any heavy cross. And it is with this cross that I come to the altar where Your arms are open wide.
My timely prayer is that no memorial like the National Memorial for Peace & Justice of the Equal Justice Initiative need be made ever again. With the racism now being perpetuated against Asians as a result of COVID-19, I will be praying all the more.
The gift of a scattered mind is that it reaches to the limits of everything I know and grasps to make sense of it. It’s the only way that a new baby girl, a recollection of old habits, a life in religious community, and a global pandemic can come together and remind me that love is greater than fear. Love is the only thing that brings my mind back to center.
One of the great images of Lent is Jesus being driven into the desert where he goes toe-to-toe with Satan. As real as Jesus’ temptations are to pleasure, fame, and power, they are but expressions of a more fundamental and deceptively obvious one: the temptation to forget who and whose you are.
There is something I find at Mass on Ash Wednesday that I don’t find elsewhere. Nowhere besides here do I step in line with old ladies in purple sweaters, fellow students, elderly widows, the nuns, the homeless, the workers on lunch hour, the priests, and the University president to face our shame, imperfections, and our transgressions, together.
Ash Wednesday is just one week away. Before you decide to give up candy or french fries or even Facebook, I encourage you to take some advice: do nothing.