Returning

“Return to me with all your heart. Don’t let fear keep us apart.” Jl 2:12

- from First Reading, Ash Wednesday

One more Lent, one more chance to return to God with all our hearts. How does that happen? In the tedium of the budget process, in the complexity of the calendar with its priorities writ large, with its days strewn with cancellations and notes; in the age old call to the Stations of the Cross; in the horror of the computer screen bloodied with beheadings in the Mideast; in the ebb and flow of daily life, how do we return to God with all our hearts?

So have we been absent? Fr. Ron Rolheiser tells us that we are distracted, and he is right, but we have never left. Too busy, too scattered, too absorbed in our own agendas, too entranced by social media maybe, but we have never left. So why the return?  Recently Oliver Sacks, acclaimed writer and professor of neurology considered his recent diagnosis with a terminal illness. 

Over the last few days, I have been able to see my life as from a great altitude, as a sort of landscape, and with a deepening sense of the connection of all its parts. This does not mean I am finished with life.

On the contrary, I feel intensely alive, and I want and hope in the time that remains to deepen my friendships, to say farewell to those I love, to write more, to travel if I have the strength, to achieve new levels of understanding and insight.

So how does this story relate to the biblical call to “Return to me with all your heart?” Does it summon us to see our lives from a still perspective? Does it search our landscape for its rocks, its water, its sand, its fertile soil, its roaring fire? How do our landscape’s contours reveal the goodness experienced, the opportunities squandered, the liturgies celebrated, the gifts received, the thanksgiving due?  

How do we nourish hope? How do we deepen friendships? By what prayer, relationships, reading, asceticism and commitment do we deepen our understanding and insight? Are these habits / rituals a “return”?  Or are we always returning to the God who is forever here (“closer than whiteness is to snow”), to the relationship which is always intensely present?

In recent years the Leadership Conference of Women Religious (LCWR) has invited women religious once again, to deeper contemplation, to the ancient art of silence, waiting, listening and responding. The example of contemplative dialogue demonstrated by LCWR’s leaders in the midst of conflict with the institutional church has sparked curiosity. “What is this process?” People wonder.

“I have been able to see my life as from a great altitude, as a sort of landscape, and with a deepening sense of the connection of all its parts.”

So, looking at our landscape, we ponder the summons of Ash Wednesday. We answer the sometimes serious, sometimes playful, question “What are you doing for Lent?” Maybe we answer, “We are returning.”

[Sr. Helen Maher Garvey, BVM, is an organizational consultant for religious congregations. Presently she serves on the Board of the National Catholic Reporter Publishing Company. She held the position of Director of the Office of Pastoral Services for the Diocese of Lexington for 10 years and served in the presidency of the Leadership Conference of Women Religious (LCWR) from 1986 to 1989.]