Daily Lenten Reflections

Daily Lenten Reflections: Tonight we are simply ending the time of vigiling, praying and fasting that we began on Thursday night when we washed each other's feet here in this place, the vigiling and praying and fasting that continued through Good Friday when we came forward one by one to kiss or embrace or bow or kneel before the image of the cross.

Daily Lenten Reflections: The humble and simple act of washing became the focus of the ritual, instead of the activity of arranging chairs, with predetermined volunteers processing up to the sanctuary. In our foot washing liturgies now, we have a sort of "rolling admissions" style of procession. The presider begins by washing and kissing the feet of someone, anyone.

Daily Lenten Reflections: The Exsultet is the legend, the guide to the panoramic landscape of the Easter Vigil. Who is gathered to rejoice? Heavenly powers, choirs of angels, all creation. The earth and the Mother Church and all God's people join them.

Daily Lenten Reflections: The first step of the Triduum is not to describe Christ's action but to emphasize how it continues. Before we reflect on the cross and empty tomb, we recognize how the effects of Jesus' dying and rising continue to shape our lives.

Daily Lenten Reflections: The Easter Triduum — it is the Mirror Ball Trophy of the liturgical year. Sunday after Sunday, season after season brings us to this moment. It is the celebration of the Paschal Mystery, and we have been gearing up for it all year. 

Daily Lenten Reflections: This washing of one another's feet is a vision of how people might live together. We do it but once a year; we want to get to that night between Saturday and Sunday with its fire, its song, its scriptures, its font of baptism and its table of bread and wine.

Daily Lenten Reflections: Mystagogy, not a word you hear every day, comes to us from the Greek meaning "interpretation of mystery." In the early church, the newly baptized (neophytes) first had to experience the ceremony of the water bath, followed by anointing and coming to the table for the first time, before ever being allowed to talk about it.

Daily Lenten Reflections: When the people of Damascus, Christian or Muslim or otherwise, think of Holy Week, they think of marching bands. In this city, there are at least a dozen varieties of Christian communities, all of them clustered around the "Christian Quarter" of the Old City.

Daily Lenten Reflections: In scripture, we read of Jesus' stories and write our own guidebook from them. We also orient ourselves with prayer. We agree to pay deep attention to the road instead of just gliding along. We look around. We see. We acknowledge where we are. In prayer, we ask God to guide us.

Daily Lenten Reflections: Have you ever been part of a theater production? The sets have to be painted. Costumes have to be designed. Music rehearsed, lines learned. There's a sense of solidarity as you all band together, working, practicing, laboring to build a living story.

Daily Lenten Reflections: Teachers speak of the "Lenten tripod” of prayer, fasting and almsgiving. I always think of the wooden stools my grandfather built and painted and gave out to the mothers in the family to use in their kitchens. The stools had three legs and they were sturdy and true.

Daily Lenten Reflections: The "original" sin is not primarily that humanity "disobeyed" God; the sin is that we ceased to be hungry for God and for God alone, ceased to see our whole life depending on the whole world as a sacrament of communion with God. 

Daily Lenten Reflections: No Scripture passage could set a more insightful theme for the month of April than the Fifth Sunday of Lent’s first reading. The only problem is that it should be read in its original Hebrew, not in an English translation.

Daily Lenten Reflections: Can Lent be Lent for us in these times unless we make such lamentation integral to our lives and ritual? We rehearse our baptized responsibility to intercede for the world God so loves, and to lament with and for that world, ourselves included.

Daily Lenten Reflections: During the Easter season, we renew our baptismal promises as we are sprinkled with holy water during Mass.

Daily Lenten Reflections: It was an early November Sunday and the readings focused on the end time. The weather was unseasonably warm and the hillsides of southern Ohio blazed with autumn color in the bright sunshine. 

Daily Lenten Reflections: Many Lents ago, the children invited a friend for supper. I apologized for the meager Friday fare: made-from-scratch macaroni and cheese with three or four different grated cheeses, fruit, homemade bran muffins and jam. 

Daily Lenten Reflections: March is the time of year when we take stock, make amends and resolve to do better as we immerse ourselves in the spiritual disciplines of Lent. 

Daily Lenten Reflections: Should the Gospel we profess and the liturgy we do raise in us some great unease with the political, economic, military and environmental conditions that are our responsibility as U.S. citizens and residents?

Daily Lenten Reflection: "A hint of warmth, a hint of growth, a welcome return of spring; formed in stone, an arch for March, a month of madness, and of gladness."

Daily Lenten Reflections: The scrutinies are an integral part of the Lenten season, which originated as a season of baptismal preparation. By the fourth century, Lent developed as a formal period of intensive spiritual preparation that followed a lengthy time of catechetical formation. 

Daily Lenten Reflections: Should the Gospel we profess and the liturgy we do raise in us some great unease with the political, economic, military and environmental conditions that are our responsibility as U.S. citizens and residents? 

Daily Lenten Reflections: Many of the Lenten readings this year feature a great conductor in the person of St. Luke the Evangelist. Just as an orchestra conductor provides a sensitive interpretation of the composer’s mind and vision, so also this Gospel writer provides his own personal style in telling the story of redemption. 

Daily Lenten Reflections: Have you ever felt powerless? Other people are making decisions that directly affect your life, yet you have no say in the matter. 

Daily Lenten Reflections: March is the month of Lent, when we are asked to rebuild the foundations of our lives on the solid rock of prayer, fasting and almsgiving. 

Daily Lenten Reflections: Lent is about the deed we are going to do when Lent is over. When Lent has ended on Holy Thursday afternoon, we enter into three days — Good Friday, Holy Saturday, Easter Sunday — that are the very heart of our year and of our lives.

Daily Lenten Reflections: Let us see how the season of Lent is an invitation for us to imaginatively enter once again into the story of our "questing hero" Jesus, and to walk with him through the various stages of a journey that seem, in light of the long history and recurring motifs of such tales, surprisingly predictable.

Daily Lenten Reflections: From time to time, I travel from home to lead retreats and parish missions or to give presentations to church ministers. My preparations for such trips include a lot of advance planning — making travel arrangements, preparing the presentations, coordinating mission details with the host parish — and prayer. 

Daily Lenten Reflections: Isaiah 55 is addressed to Jews in the sixth century B.C.E. who were displaced to Babylon, who had, in various ways, accommodated the pressures, requirements and promises of Babylonian empire at the expense of their own peculiar Jewish way in the world.

Daily Lenten Reflections: Memories are treasures in our later years. We often sit and sort through them, like the nursery-rhyme King of Hearts in his counting house. Some of them bring a tear or two to our eyes as we reach back for something or someone who is now beyond our grasp. 

Daily Lenten Reflections: Some of the great discoveries of our time are the revelations identified by the Hubble telescope. We would never have known either the vast immensity of the universe nor the billions of years when it first began its journey.

Daily Lenten Reflections: It is significant this year that the month containing the first four liturgical readings for Lent begins with the Eighth Sunday in Ordinary Time. The Scripture passages for that weekend set the theme for the other four.

Daily Lenten Reflections: The individual soul must find God in what seem to be the great inconsistencies and absurdities of life: This is the invitation of all the great religious traditions.

Daily Lenten Reflections: Lent is not just a neat six weeks in the spring of the year that gets you all holy and housecleaned in time for Easter. Lent can also creep up behind you and take you by surprise at any point on the calendar of your life. 

Daily Lenten Reflections: Coming from a family of eight children, my attempts at jockeying for position in the constellation of siblings basically took the form of whining and complaining.

Daily Lenten Reflections: The sine qua non of a community’s rituals — little ones and enormous ones — are the way they belong to all present. 

Daily Lenten Reflections: While interviewing children for their first Reconciliation, I asked Tommy what "penance" was. He answered without hesitation: "It's sort of like a time-out." 

Daily Lenten Reflections: Lent is the season where we wrestle with the times that we need repentance and reconciliation.

Daily Lenten Reflections: I often find specks of burnt palm caught in the deep wrinkles of my forehead on Ash Wednesday night. 

Daily Lenten Reflections: Attempting to express our unity in diversity, our local ministerium learned from one of the clergy who is Episcopalian about the budding national practice called "Ashes to Go.​" 

Daily Lenten Reflections: Lent has always been a tough subject and season for me to embrace. If we are serious about it and looking for transformation (nothing casual about that!) then it is interesting that cultures everywhere have pulled up its antidote or opposite to precede our serious buckling down to Lent.