Forty Days of Tenderness

The short essay below was published online yesterday (Sunday, March 1) as part of the Intent series of daily Lenten meditations. (Copyright © 2015 LEM).

Intent is a joint project of the Lutheran Episcopal Ministry (LEM) at MIT, Episcopal BU (the Episcopal Chaplaincy at Boston University), the Lutheran Episcopal Campus Ministry at Northeastern University and the Episcopal Chaplaincy at Boston College, The Crossing, St. Bartholomew's Episcopal Church in Cambridge, and Emmanuel Episcopal Church in Boston.

Note: these congregations exploring together the possibility of becoming a mission hub or mission cluster with a focus on creating affordable housing opportunities in the form of intentional communities --hence the reference in the essay below.

You can sign up for Intent (it's free) here. Note that the daily meditations, which you can receive via e-mail, include not only written ones but visual and musical ones as well.

Dawn, Second Sunday in Lent
(c) Jane Redmont 2015

Forty Days of Tenderness

Two or three decades ago, my beloved mentor, Krister Stendahl, preached an Ash Wednesday sermon I will never forget. The cry of Ash Wednesday and Lent, he reminded us, is “Return to the Lord your God!” Return, he added, to God who is tender and merciful. Lent, he continued, is a time to remember the tenderness of God and therefore (here’s where he got me) to learn anew to be tender with ourselves.

Lent is the church’s annual retreat. It is a time of truth-seeking and truth-telling, of re-attuning our lives to live in justice and mercy, of renewal in prayer and practice. For many of us, this may involve additional time in solitude. But the self-examination of Lent is not for reflection on our self alone. It is not simply about “Jesus and me.” We are on this 40-day retreat together.

So we return to the unending tenderness of the Holy One of Blessing. We let this tenderness touch us and cradle us. We let it live with and within us. And we learn—again or for the first time—to live together, with our households and congregations, with the stranger on the street, with this new mission cluster, with our sisters and brothers who need housing, with those we love and those who are hard to love.

This takes time and care. It may feel slow and require some inner untangling and delicate steps in our community life. Lent is difficult. But it need not be harsh. How will we live these forty days of tenderness?

Jane Redmont is a theologian, spiritual director, and pastoral worker and is the author of two books including When in Doubt, Sing: Prayer in Daily Life.

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Perseverance, suffering, a word from a Desert Father, a commentary, and a commentary on the commentary

During Lent I read excerpts from a book by David G.R. Keller (an Episcopal priest and scholar)  Desert Banquet: A Year of Wisdom from the Desert Mothers and Fathers (Liturgical Press 2011).

It is now the season of Easter (which lasts for 50 days, remember and celebrate!) but I picked up the book again yesterday. It has a meditation for each day and this was yesterday's. Each meditation is composed of a short saying by a Desert Father or Mother and a paragraph-long commentary by Keller.

Abba John continued, "Do your work in peace. Persevere in keeping vigil, in hunger and third, in cold and nakedness, and in sufferings."

‎Abba John knew the path to transformation must be single-minded but is not easy. The "work" is not an end in itself and we will have difficulty letting go of control of life and our false self. A decision to commit our lives to God does not automatically mean freedom from temptations or anxieties. We will be distracted from God's voice. The desert elders valued stillness because it helped them do their "work in peace." Their peace was not the absence of inner conflict. It was resting in an openness to God's grace. One example is "keeping vigil," a period, usually at night, where various postures of openness, combined with chanting psalms or expressions of a desire for God's presence, open the heart for God's presence. Fasts from food and water helped keep their focus on God rather than physical satisfaction. The desert nights were cold and their clothes were simple. The self-imposed hardships brought a variety of "sufferings" that would refine the soul's quest. (Meditation for April 26, Keller, p. 78.)

To which I add:

For us and for many around us, the desert is the daily reality: because of poverty, oppression, sorrow, alienating work, the demands of family and other relationships. 

 The question then becomes not so much choosing those sufferings and fasts in the night (and the day) but how to live in a holy manner with the desert fasts and hardships that are imposed on us. The same discipline applies. 

Amid the sufferings that we did not seek, can we keep our focus on God? Can we open our hearts? Can we somehow seek and find stillness and rest in God's grace? Can we decolonize our souls? Can we live in our bodies with hope in the Presence? Can we too, like the desert mothers and fathers, keep vigil?

Cross-posted in slightly different form on Facebook on April 26. 

William Henry Jackson (1843-1942), Granite Rocks Base of Laramie Peak, 1870.

The Woman at the Well

'tis I, the delinquent blogger.

A deep and fresh Lent to those of you who observe it.

I will tell you in the next post (yes, there will be a next post) about my Lenten practice, but meanwhile, it is Year A for those Western Christians who live in lectionary-land, and Sunday is the day we hear about the woman at the well (a.k.a. the Samaritan woman) in the Gospel of John.

I am not preaching on Sunday (I'm on the following weekend with the story of the man born blind) but I did preach on this text many moons ago in the form of a kind of one-woman show, being the woman at the well several years after Jesus' visit, reminiscing. This was when I was a Catholic laywoman in full-time pastoral ministry, working as Social Justice Minister at Boston's Paulist Center. I posted the sermon on this blog three years ago, so here is the link if you want to read it or read it again. Enjoy.


"The Samaritan Woman at the Well" by He Qi

Ash Wednesday

Teach us to care and not to care
Teach us to sit still


**********T.S. Eliot, "Ash Wednesday"




For the full text of the poem, click here.

Good Friday: the life and death of Sister Dorothy Stang

Yesterday evening I began my Good Friday reading, Martyr of the Amazon: The Life of Sister Dorothy Stang, by Roseanne Murphy.

Somehow I didn't want to read about Jesus. I wanted to read about someone who was living Jesus.

Dorothy Stang, a Sister of Notre Dame de Namur, lived and worked with Brazilian peasants in the landless people's movement in the Amazon. She was killed there in 2005.

Apparently there is a new documentary on her. There was a segment about it recently on PBS's "Now" program. Even the New York Post has written about it.

Website for the documentary, "They Killed Sister Dorothy," is here, with beautiful images and music and a trailer and all kinds of information. Narration by (yes!) Martin Sheen.

Stang was from Ohio and the Dayton Daily News wrote a three-part series on her after her death.

* * * * *
In related news, the Episcopal Café has a series of Stations of the Cross up. The one from Central America (El Salvador) is haunting. (Do not look at it if you are a trauma survivor; it is made up of drawings of tortured men and women. It resides at La UCA - the Jesuit-run University of Central America.) Another one is for children. Yet another is a series from Kenya. (I'd posted an image from that one two years ago here.)

Last year I posted the Arcatao Stations of the Cross from El Salvador. (That's a different series from the one mentioned above.)

And the year before, more Latin American Stations --images by Nobel Peace laureate Adolfo Pérez Esquivel with words from Argentina-- and some Stations by a Tanzanian artist with words by a womanist theologian from the U.S. (The latter, in a book called Where You There? is a favorite of mine.)

Icon of Holy Silence

Thanks to my friend Moira (the same one for whom some of you have been praying) for leading me to this icon by Bill McNichols (William Hart McNichols, S.J.).

Here is a short commentary on the icon by the artist.

Mothering Sunday - Laetare Sunday

It's Laetare Sunday here in the Western liturgical churches and Mothering Sunday in the Church of England. My friend Rob (aka Padre Rob+, with a gorgeous new blog that is almost all visual) sent this prayer earlier today with a Theotokos, using one of the Theotokos apps on Facebook. I'm not the greatest Anselm fan on the planet (understatement), but this is lovely.

As a mother cradles her child, so you enfold us, gently in your arms. As a mother comforts their pain, you calm and quieten our souls with your love.

As a mother teaches her child, so, Lord, you guide us, leading us through life. As a mother listens and cares, O Lord, you hear us and answer our prayers.

As a mother cries for her child, so you are weeping over our sins. As a mother feeds us from our birth, you daily nourish us with the bread of life.

Jesus as a mother, you gather us all to you. In your compassion bring forgiveness and grace. In you tenderness restore and remake us, In your love, bring us joy, give us peace.

Song based on a text by St Anselm; music by David Ogden.

Rob notes that he is not the originator of this quote. A friend of his from London, John Woodhouse, shared it with him after his church sang it at Mass today. Come to think of it, John's is a blog I used to read regularly and hadn't visited in a while. Hello, Organist Librarian! And thank you.

Taking up our cross: a meditation by Magdalene

Okay, back to Lent.

Magdalene, ever the fine preacher, theologian, and biblical interpreter, has a meditation on what the cross is which is a must-read. When you think of someone "having a cross to bear," what do you think? When Jesus says "take up your cross and follow me," what does he mean? Read Mags's thoughts on this here.

First Sunday of Lent

Spirit of integrity,

you drive us into the desert

to search out our truth.

Give us clarity to know what is right,

and courage to reject what is strategic;

that we may abandon the false innocence

of failing to choose at all,

but may follow the purposes of Jesus Christ,

Amen.

Janet Morley

Collect for Lent 1

All Desires Known (expanded edition, 1992)

"Journeys into the Heart of Prayer"

Whew, I didn't mean to post quite so much today, especially on a day of prayer and fasting, but I don't want to wait to put this one up since I just got a copy of the pdf and the series starts Sunday.

Click here for information on a Sunday 5 p.m. series on prayer, every Sunday in March, facilitated by yours truly at All Saints Episcopal Church in Greensboro, North Carolina. All welcome.

I am giving up stress for Lent

I'm serious.

Not that we have entire control over stress, as I know all too well given the fall's two house intrusions and various job, church, financial, and other matters of recent preoccupation.

But I wonder what it will be like to be mindful of what I contribute to stress and how I respond to outside stress.

And yes, stress can get in the way of both our relationship to God and our relationship to other people. (The recent issue of Newsweek notwithstanding.)

Lent: a time to breathe more deeply.

Liturgical blogiversary

Ash Wednesday is, liturgically speaking, the anniversary of this blog. The calendar anniversary has already passed, but since I am a liturgical creature, today's the day. It's been two years. I started haunting other people's blogs sometime the year before I started my own.

Thanks to all who visit here!

Daffodil report

A lone daffodil was working very hard to emerge from its green sheath this morning and to burst into yellow.

It is still working at it, but under the influence of the noon sun, has been joined by several of its siblings.

Daffodil solidarity!

+Maya Pavlova has been asleep all day. Doubtless she will emerge when the sun starts to go down. She has missed all the vacuum cleaner action so far. We're in Mardi Gras cleaning mode. Soon friends will pop in for crêpes. (More on my annual Shrove Tuesday event here.) The party is early this year, at tea-time, because I am teaching on Tuesday evenings this semester. We'll also have a little late crêpes-eating after I get home at 10:30 p.m. Crêpes in the morning, crêpes in the evening, crêpes till the midnight hour.

Arcatao Stations of the Cross: The Fourteenth Station

From the walls of the church in Arcatao, El Salvador.
Photos of the Stations have been traveling as an exhibit "Stations of the Struggle" during Lent. Photographer Roland Torres, from Madison, Wisconsin, took them during a delegation visit. Madison is sister city to Arcatao.

Arcatao Stations of the Cross: The Eighth Station

Arcatao Stations of the Cross: The Seventh Station

Arcatao Stations of the Cross: The Sixth Station

From the walls of the church in Arcatao, El Salvador.

Photos of the Stations have been traveling as an exhibit "Stations of the Struggle" during Lent. Photographer Roland Torres, from Madison, Wisconsin, took them during a delegation visit. Madison is sister city to Arcatao.

Arcatao Stations of the Cross: The Fifth Station

Arcatao Stations of the Cross: The Fourth Station

From the walls of the church in Arcatao, El Salvador.

Photos of the Stations have been traveling as an exhibit "Stations of the Struggle" during Lent. Photographer Roland Torres, from Madison, Wisconsin, took them during a delegation visit. Madison is sister city to Arcatao.