Category: Writing

This piece appeared on March 11, 2024 on CatholicArtistConnection.com, as part of that website’s Lenten Reflections series.

Mid-way through the penitential season of Lent came yesterday’s bright spot of hope and joy: Laetare Sunday.  The liturgical color of the day — rose — shone like a beacon against the unrelenting purple of Lent, a visual sign to the faithful that Easter is within our sight.

Today, as we embark on the fourth week of our Lenten journey, donning purple once again, we remain heartened.  As always, God’s grace, mercy and unconditional love surround us.  New energy underlies our seasonal practices of prayer, fasting and almsgiving.  We sharpen our focus on how to live in right relationship with God, ourselves and others.  

In the First Reading for today’s Mass, Isaiah (65:17-21) speaks of the joy, happiness and delight of God’s creation, and assures us that “no longer shall the sound of weeping be heard there, or the sound of crying”.  The Responsorial Psalm (30) continues the theme: “You changed my mourning into dancing.”  And the royal official in the Gospel (John 4:43-54) could be any one of us, “who believed what Jesus said to him”, after he pleaded with Jesus and then experienced the healing of his son.  

Yes, the sorrow of Christ’s suffering, crucifixion and death loom ahead of us.  And yes, we are living in a great big world seemingly drowning in war, violence, tragedy, discord, uncertainty, grief and gloom.  In our smaller personal world, we may be living with circumstances that are deeply troubling.

But the hope and the joy of Laetare Sunday are still fresh for us this day.  We are reminded that sorrow is not the end of the story.  From sorrow will rise the salvific reality of Christ’s Resurrection, with the assurance that we all share in the miracle of eternal life and light, of redemption. 

With our faith thus strengthened, we can resume our Lenten observances over the next three weeks with renewed commitment.  By leavening sorrow with the gifts of hope and joy that God bestows so generously, we can face any challenges that the world and our individual lives bring us. 

***

As a Benedictine Oblate, I (try to) live according to the Rule of St. Benedict.   Chapter 49 of the Rule begins with this instruction: “The life of a monk ought to be a continuous Lent.”  I (try to) reach that state by allowing the meaning of Lent, with its intertwined sorrow and joy and its promise of redemption, to remain relevant throughout the year, in every liturgical season. 

Here is a practice that helps me: Often, daily if I can, I compose two litanies — two prayerful lists — on the facing pages of a notebook so I can easily toggle back and forth between them.  One page is headed “Blessings Noted” and the other “Prayers Needed”.  I bring these litanies to God, giving thanks and praise and asking for help.  Every time I compose my litanies, I start fresh on new pages with new blessings and needs.  This practice helps me appreciate the sacred rhythms of my life, fosters my growth in prayer and brings me closer to God.

The apartment in Bayside.  Perhaps I am three or four.  I am sitting, crouching, squatting, whatever posture I need to be in, on the kitchen floor.  I am drawing with crayons on paper.  The only light is in the kitchen, where Dad is fixing his breakfast.  It is dark everywhere else.  Quiet, too, as Mom and Owen, and John if he has been born yet, are asleep.  Dad and I do not speak.

Am I drawing what I remember to be my first images?  Attempts to depict what it was like to be in the car and drive under the big towers of what I now know to be either the Whitestone or the Throgs Neck Bridge.  I remember trying to show, in a static drawing, what motion felt like — approaching the first tower, being under it, turning around to look up through the back window to see it recede, then turning forward to approach the next tower and repeat the experience.  Perhaps I should have been making a motion picture, not a drawing.  As if!

I wish I had those images.  Where did they go?  Crumpled up in the day’s trash, when Dad had finished his breakfast and gone to work, and Mom was up and starting her day with two or three of us?  Or filed away somewhere in a manila envelope that eventually got lost?  Or maybe still in the house in Connecticut?

I don’t remember why we were told we had to do this.  In 1958 or 1959, in first grade in Queens, we all went in an orderly line to the school auditorium, with its row upon row of fixed-to-the-floor chairs with flip-up seats.  We were shown how to crouch between the rows.  We were shown how to cradle the backs of our heads in our hands, and to draw our heads down towards our thighs.  I think this happened only once.  I don’t know when or how I learned or was told or realized that this was an air-raid drill in the event of a nuclear bomb drop.  I have no emotion around this memory.

A few years later, in Connecticut, I stood in the doorway to the living room and glimpsed my mother weeping in front of our small television set.  In grainy black-and-white, President Kennedy was on the screen, and I heard the words “Cuban missiles”.  This scene frightened me though I did not know what a missile was.  I did not want Mom to see me seeing her weep, so I backed out of the doorway and slipped down the hallway and up the stairs to my bedroom. 

Around that same time, I had a dream that Russian tanks came streaming off Exit 19 of the Connecticut Turnpike and lumbered towards our house.  This dream also frightened me.  I did not tell anyone about it.  

I have known my oldest friend since both she and I were born — since even before that, because who knows what kind of consciousness exists in the womb.

My friend has never left me, though I have often neglected her.  Or ignored her.  Or worse, denied her.  But we have never truly separated; we always come back together, comfortably or not.

My friend and I know the best and the worst of each other.  We also know the mediocrity of each other.  Sometimes this knowledge is just fine, other times it is so disappointing.

Sometimes my friend and I fight.  There have been long stretches of time when we do not understand each other.  She pulls one way; I want to go the other way.  We each want to be how we want to be, regardless of the other.

Sometimes my friend criticizes me or tells me things that I don’t care to hear or learn about myself.  In fairness, I have also done this to her.  This can be unpleasant.

Often my friend enlightens me.  She tells me things I didn’t know but, as soon as she tells me, I know that I had wanted to know.  Aha moments, for sure!!  She often seems to know what I am searching for, before I do.

I try hard to protect my friend.  I don’t want anyone to hurt her.  I want to be safe.  Sometimes this chafes her.  She wants to be free.  She wants to be vulnerable.

Sometimes I try to hide my friend.  Sometimes I am ashamed of her.  She can be a fuddy-duddy, “not cool”.  She can be embarrassing.  She tries to make me do things, say things, that I might not want to or be ready for.

Usually, I like my friend.  She’s smart, sometimes funny, sensitive, perceptive, creative, spiritual.  I want her to like me back.  I think she does, and don’t want to do anything that would change her mind about me.

And then there are times when I really don’t like my friend at all …

But do you know what really counts?  The only thing that does count?  That I love my friend, and my friend loves me.  Not just because Jesus tells us to love one another.  But because we are to love the other “as yourself”.  Love your neighbor as youself.  

Yes, my oldest friend and I are one and the same — me, myself and I.