Freed to know

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I once went on retreat to Hyning Hall. I just wanted to be silent and to experience God’s love. At dinner time I went to the community dining room. I took some food and began to look around me. There were about 12 sisters in the room. Nobody spoke, as was their custom, but they smiled and acknowledged one another.

 

Then the music began to play. In the film ‘The Shawshank Redemption’, you’ll remember when one prisoner breaks into the office and puts on a record to play over the Tannoy system. The music fills the air. It’s the most amazing moment in the film: the prisoners stop working and look around them as beauty breaks into their drab prison lives.

 

I have always seen it as an experience of the reality of God whereby beauty transforms and heals pain and ugliness. As the music began to play in the nuns’ dining room, I was taken beyond myself into something much deeper and more wonderful than anything I had experienced before. It was about finding what is really real.

 

It seems to me that much of our Lenten journey is about facing the false gods in our lives, whatever they may be, and allowing them to die. Sadly, I’m becoming more aware that we human beings would rather believe in illusion than reality. The human heart would rather hear what brings comfort than truths that bring transformation and new life. I guess it’s because the road to transformation is hard and involves letting go.

 

Lent is a time to focus on the call that we’re given to enter into the Paschal mystery. It’s about our journey from death to life. It’s about being transformed, and so Lent is a penitential time, but it’s also a life-giving time, because it can lead to change and transformation.

 

It’s interesting that we begin every Lenten journey by marking ourselves with ashes. Sadly, they’ve become for many a sort of magic talisman. We wear them as a sign that we want to begin again and enter into the mystery of transformation. Richard Rohr says: “Remember, finally, that the ashes on your forehead are created from the burnt palms of last Palm Sunday. New beginnings invariably come from old, false things that are allowed to die.”

 

Father Thomas Keating is known as one of the architects of “Centering Prayer”, a method of contemplative prayer. This is what he says about Lent: “Lent is a time to renew wherever we are in that process that I call the divine therapy. It’s a time to look at what our instinctual needs are, look at what the dynamics of our unconscious are.”

 

In other words, Lent is an invitation to look deeply into ourselves, be brutally honest about ourselves and allow God the space and time to transform us deeply within. It’s about what God does within us, not what we do for God, and the question is, can we have the courage to open ourselves to God and what God wants to do in us? While it might sound trite, I think God’s desire is that we know we’re loved, and the Lenten journey is the freeing and moving into grace that this demands. Therefore, take time each day to pray and think and let go. It might be the best thing you’ve ever done.