Lenten resolution:
Trust with childlike simplicity

		Notes from the  Vicar General  Msgr. Paul J. Swain

Whoever receives one such child in my name receives me (Mt. 18:5) is the theme Pope John Paul II has selected for this season of Lent.

It recalls for us the responsibility we have as individuals and as a society to assure that children are allowed to be born, are respectfully treated, properly cared for physically, and formed and nourished in spiritual ways.

As we take advantage of this season of Lent to reflect on the health of our own spiritual lives, this theme also encourages us to recall how often Our Lord used children as examples of the simplicity and trust that a disciple of his ought to have.

As we get older we tend to complicate things with questions that cannot be answered, doubts that get us off course, pressure from the secular culture that tempts us, suffering that turns us inward, and a variety of worries that shake our trust.

Lack of trust

Trust, or really the lack of trust, is a hot topic today. Politicians lodge challenges at one another that the American people cannot trust their opponents. Intelligence agencies are said to provide information that is not trustworthy that has led to war. Some say the Church cannot be trusted because of how some have handled sexual abuse cases, or because of the apostolic structure.

Who can we trust? History and experience tell us that we weak human beings, even with good intentions, are not always reliable. Trust and verify is an adage some advise. As Vicar General and Pastor I do the best I can each day. But ask those who minister in the diocese or parishes, and they rightly are regularly frustrated. Human frailty and human pride are reasons why Jesus calls us so often to forgiveness and mercy.

We break trust with one another through sin or ignorance. We can rest in our disappointment of self or others. Or we can lift the burden by owning up to our own mistakes and by forgiving those who have broken our trust. It does not mean that we approve of sinful acts or harmful behavior; it does recognize that festering hurt wears us down and turns us away from God. One of the beautiful gifts of Christ is the Sacrament of Penance which is available as often as we need it.

Need to forgive

Who can we trust? Our help is in the name of the Lord, who made heaven and earth. We do not need to ask that question if we enter into the presence of the Lord with childlike simplicity. God may not answer our prayers in the way we want or on the timetable we might like. His plan for us may not always be apparent or in the form we expect. Yet only in Him can we fully trust.

The Holy Father writes in his Lenten message: With childlike simplicity, let us turn to God and call him, as Jesus taught us in the prayer of the "Our Father," Abba, Father. Let us repeat this prayer during Lent, let us repeat it with deep emotion. By calling God "Our Father," we will better realize that we are his children and feel we are brothers and sisters of one another. Thus it will be easier for us to open our hearts to the little ones, following the invitation of Jesus: "whoever receives one such child in my name receives me."

May our Lenten resolution be that when Easter comes, we are able to trust more fully in the Risen One, who died on the cross that we might believe.

Agony in the Garden:
Place of special loneliness

First in a seven-part Lenten series.

		The Garden of Gethsemane  The Place of Transformation Fr. Ronald Rolheiser

We tend to misunderstand "the passion of Jesus." Spontaneously we think of it as the pain of the physical sufferings he endured on the road to his death. Partly that misses the point.

Jesus' passion should be understood precisely as "passio," passivity, a certain submissive helplessness he had to undergo in counter-distinction to his power and activity. The passion of Jesus refers to the helplessness he had to endure during the last hours of his life, a helplessness extremely fruitful for him and for us.

And the first component in that helplessness begins in the Garden of Gethsemane, immediately after he has celebrated the Last Supper. The Scriptures tell us that he went out into the garden with his disciples to pray for the strength he needed to face the ordeal that was now imminent.

In a garden

It's significant that this agony should take place in a garden. In archetypal literature (and Scripture, among other things, is this kind of literature), a garden is not a place to pick cucumbers and onions.

Archetypally, a garden is the place of delight, the place of love, the place to drink wine, the place where lovers meet in the moonlight, the place of intimacy. The garden is paradise. That's why Adam and Eve in their paradisiacal state are described as being in a garden.

So it's no accident that Jesus ends up having to sweat blood in a garden. And it's precisely as a lover that he's in agony there.

Jesus, the lover

The Jesus who sweats blood in the Garden of Gethsemane is not the great King, full of pain because the sheep will not heed the shepherd; nor is it the great Magus, full of sorrow because nobody wants to pick up on the truth he's revealed; nor is it the great warrior, frustrated in his efforts to defeat the powers of sin, death, and darkness. These pains and frustrations mostly take place elsewhere, among the crowds, in the temple, in the desert. The garden is for lovers, not for kings, magi, and warriors.

It's Jesus, the lover, the one who calls us to intimacy and delight with him, who sweats blood in the garden. That's why, in describing his suffering during his passion, the evangelists focus little on his physical sufferings (which must have been horrific). Indeed, Mark puts it all in a single line: "They led him away and crucified him."

What the Gospel writers focus on is not the scourging, the whips, the ropes, the nails, the physical pain - none of that. They emphasize rather that, in all of this, Jesus is alone, misunderstood, lonely, isolated, without support, unanimity-minus-one.

What's emphasized is his suffering as a lover - the agony of a heart that's ultra-sensitive, gentle, loving, understanding, warm, inviting, hungry to embrace everyone but which instead finds itself misunderstood, alone, isolated, hated, brutalized, facing murder.

Missing the point

That's the point that has been too often missed in both spirituality and popular devotion. I remember as a young boy being instructed by a wonderful nun who told us that Jesus sweated blood in the Garden of Gethsemane because, in his divine nature, he was saddened because he already foresaw that many people would not accept the sacrifice of his death. That's a wonderfully pious thought, but it misses the point of what happened in Gethsemane.

In Gethsemane, we see Jesus suffering as a lover. His agony is not that of the Son of God, frustrated because many people will not accept his sacrifice, nor even is his agony the all too understandable fear of the physical pain that awaits him. No, his real pain is that of the lover who's been misunderstood and rejected in a way that is mortal and humiliating.

Parallels our agony

What Jesus is undergoing in Gethsemane might aptly be paralleled to what a good, faithful, loving, very sensitive, and deeply respectful man or woman would feel if he or she were falsely accused of pedophilia, publicly judged as guilty, and now made to stand powerless, isolated, misunderstood, and falsely judged before the world, family, friends and loved ones. Such a person, too, would surely pray: "If it is possible, let this cup pass from me!"

The agony in the garden is many things, but, first of all, it's Jesus' entry into the darkest black hole of human existence, the black hole of bitter misunderstanding, rejection, aloneness, loneliness, humiliation, and the helplessness to do anything about it.

The agony in the garden is the black hole of sensitivity brutalized by callousness, love brutalized by hatred, goodness brutalized by misunderstanding, innocence brutalized by wrong judgment, forgiveness brutalized by murder, and heaven brutalized by hell. This is the deepest black hole of loneliness and it brings the lover inside us to the ground in agony, begging for release.

But, whenever our mouths are pushed into the dust of misunderstanding and loneliness inside that black hole, it's helpful to know that Jesus was there before us, tasting just our kind of loneliness.

Oblate Father Ron Rolheiser is a theologian, teacher, and award-winning author of several books on spirituality. He currently serves in Toronto and Rome as the general councilor for Canada for his religious order, the Missionary Oblates of Mary Immaculate.

Looking forward to death:
A Lenten meditation

		The Catholic  Difference  George Weigel

The late, great Fr. John Courtney Murray, S.J., was a man of aphorisms, many of them paradoxical. Thus "a gentleman is never rude, save intentionally."

After a year abruptly punctuated by the unexpected deaths of several friends, some in war and some from disease, I've been thinking about another of Father Murray's paradoxes. The precise formula escapes me but the gist was this: death is the only thing we really have to look forward to.

It's an appropriate theme for Lenten reflection. Everything else to which we look forward in life is, in the final analysis, transitory. The big game, the senior prom, the graduation, the wedding or ordination or day of final vows: all eagerly anticipated, all come, all go.

The one thing we "really have to look forward to," the one thing in our lives that isn't transitory, is death.

Fullness of life

That can be terrifying. For the Christian, though, it ought to be encouraging. Death is the passage, not to oblivion, but to the fullness of life which is promised to those who have first "died with Christ," in their baptism and in their lives.

A "death wish" is pathological, according to psychiatry. The Christian's embrace of his or her death is not a "death wish," but a final, radical, once-and-for-all conforming of our lives to Christ, who passes over to the Father through the valley of death.

Will each of us have, in our dying, the opportunity to make that once-and-for-all, complete handing-over of our lives into the merciful hands of the Father? When we pray for a "good death" that's, in part, what we're praying for. But aren't we also praying for a dying-to-self every day?

To remember, every day, that one day we shall die isn't morbid. Our dying should live in us now, so that our little deaths-to-self prepare us for that final offering of self, in which we most fully align our lives with the life of the Crucified One.

Striving for immortality

Living this way - "looking forward to death" - is about as countercultural as it gets these days. For many scientists and physicians on the cutting edge of the biotech revolution, death is a disease to be cured, not an integral part of the human condition.

But suppose death could be "cured"? Or, at the very least, indefinitely postponed? Would worldly immortality be a blessing? Or would it be a lethal blow to our humanity?

Would adding even 25 or 50 years to the normal life-span increase our happiness? Would doing the same things for a much longer time - would doing even the occasional extraordinary thing during a lengthier life-span - add to the sum total of our satisfactions?

Would we strive for goodness and great accomplishment here-and-now, absent the prod of mortality? Would there be genuine passion without mortality? Wasn't the Psalmist teaching a deep truth about the human condition when he enjoined us to "number our days" so that we might "get a heart of wisdom" (Psalm 90:12)?

There may in fact be two or three things in our lives that would not be crippled by infinite longevity. One is the quest for understanding; we can imagine that going on forever, without warping us in the process. The other exceptions are friendship and love. They, too, could grow infinitely; and as they did, our humanness would be enhanced, not destroyed. Yet that is precisely what is promised us in the Kingdom: an eternity of unfolding friendship, deeper understanding, nobler love.

Entering the kingdom

Those are surely things to look forward to. We can look forward to them only through looking forward to our death, embracing it in faith and hope.

G.K. Chesterton, another great aphorist in the paradoxical mode, said somewhere that, while man had always lost his way, "modern man has lost his address." That address is the Kingdom of God. When we forget our address, we lose our navigational bearings here and now.

We enter the Kingdom of our fulfillment through death - conformity to Christ's death in baptism, and our own death to the flesh as we now know it. When we forget that, death becomes a disease to be cured. In fact, it's the one thing we really have to look forward to.

George Weigel is a senior fellow of the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, D.C.