LIGHT ONE CANDLE
By Father Ed Dougherty

On March 25, we celebrate the Solemnity of the Annunciation of the Lord, when the Angel Gabriel announced to Mary that she had been chosen by God to be the mother of Christ. It is a day that pierces the Lenten season with joyful anticipation of the birth of Christ. It also reminds us of the deep bond between Mother and Son as we move towards Holy Week, with all the pain and loss it held for them, but also harkening to the joy of Easter, when God’s promise of salvation was fulfilled in Christ’s Resurrection.
There is a scene in the film “The Passion of the Christ” when Mary sees Jesus fall down during His grueling walk to Calvary. This prompts a memory, captured in a flashback, of her running to Jesus when He falls as a child. And seeing Him fall under the weight of the cross, she runs to Him again, falling to her knees beside Him and declaring, “I am here.”

It’s such a beautiful and heartbreaking moment because it recalls a time when these words spoken from Mother to Son would have been enough to assuage the pain of a simple childhood accident. But those words cannot mitigate the pain of the Passion and all that has been heaped upon our Savior’s shoulders. And here, Jesus raises His bloodied face to Mary and says, “See, Mother, I make all things new.”

It’s a line spoken by Christ in Revelation, when He declares, “Behold, I make all things new.” But it is brilliantly transported here to this moment because it so perfectly captures the crux of all that is being accomplished in the Passion. And that childhood scene highlights the nature of the sacrifice because it is the most perfect earthly love between Mary and Jesus and the most perfect life ever lived that is being sacrificed on our behalf.

The Solemnity of the Annunciation reminds us of the beautiful love-filled life of Christ that was so cruelly taken from Him in the Crucifixion. But those words, “Behold, I make all things new,” remind us of all that is accomplished in the pain that beset Mother and Son in the Passion because Mary’s “Yes” to the Annunciation had the intention of mission about it. And the love Jesus and Mary shared from the moment of His conception and throughout His life had the intention of mission about it because they both knew God was calling them to a purpose that required sacrifice.

This perfect love between Mother and Son sheds light on how we should look upon those placed in our lives by God. We know there will always be a struggle when we set out to accomplish great things together, but that struggle should not mitigate the joy of the love we share when we keep our eyes set on the hope of the Resurrection.

So let us greet the Solemnity of the Annunciation with the proper pause it requires during this Lenten season and appreciate all that Mary took upon herself in her “Yes” to God and all that Christ gave up in His “Yes” to suffering for our salvation. It’s a pause that can draw us into the most beautiful contemplation of the nature of the love that existed between Mary and Jesus and point us towards a new and deeper way of loving all those God entrusts to our care.

(For a free copy of The Christophers’ Lift Up Your Hearts, e-mail: mail@christophers.org)

WALKING WITH MIGRANTS
By Bishop Nicholas DiMarzio
In the more than 30 articles I have written in the last three years, I have spoken from the perspective of a person with a Ph.D. in social work, concentrating on the study of migration. My doctoral dissertation dealt with research on undocumented migration as experienced in the 1970s.

Today, however, I speak more as a moral theologian focused on Catholic social teaching, whose fundamental principle is the dignity of the human person. More than 30 years ago, the Catholic bishops of the United States published a succinct description of Catholic social teaching on migration. First, every nation has a right to defend its borders. Secondly, at the same time, every nation has an obligation to take migrants when necessary to promote the international common good.

While it may seem challenging, a nation must engage moral principles to help define its social policies, as moral tenets have helped determine how, as humans, we relate to one another.
With over 50 years of experience, first as a parish priest, then as a social worker in Catholic Charities in the Archdiocese of Newark, followed by six years at the U.S. bishops’ conference as the director of the Migration and Refugee Program, and founder of the Catholic Legal Immigration Network, Inc. (CLINIC), the largest legal support organization in the country, I have witnessed firsthand the importance of such ethical considerations.

Now, after 27 years as a bishop, I can say that I have never seen such a deplorable and unnecessary experience in human suffering that has been caused by a dysfunctional political system.

Mass deportations are unnecessary. Of course, convicted criminals who are a threat to our communities should be deported, but not without due process. The dignity of every human being, however, must be respected, especially the dignity of the worker. Our nation is not without fault because we have used undocumented labor to fill the gaps in our labor market for at least the last 50 years.

Undocumented workers work in construction, service industries, agriculture and almost every other area where U.S. workers do not want that work even when they are available. These workers are sometimes exploited. While they pay taxes and contribute to the Social Security system, they are unable to qualify for Social Security or many federal social service programs.

It is certainly a call to the conscience of our nation that we must challenge ourselves to see how we treat the aliens among us, as the Old Testament reminds us. Various efforts have been made to rectify the situation, such as the Immigration Reform and Control Act – the legalization program of 1986. However, since that legislation was not comprehensive, it merely facilitated continued undocumented migration. Undocumented migration is a benefit for some sectors of the labor market and businesses but to the detriment of the migrants, who work in substandard conditions for below-market wages.

The current political impasse has brought us to a point where we are unable to effectively negotiate issues related to U.S. immigration history. It is as bad as it can get, almost as bad as the racist curb on migration in 1924, which has been hailed as the necessary pause keeping undesirable migrants from coming to the country.

Lucky were those whose ancestors came before that date, like mine. Before 1924, almost all healthy and able-bodied immigrants could immigrate to the United States if they had either a relative or friend as a sponsor, who would guarantee that they would not become a public charge.

The end is not in sight. What made America great was migration, and without it, we may never achieve greatness again.

There are other solutions to the inherent problems which migration causes. Our intelligence and resources as a nation could certainly solve almost every one of them. The constant humanitarian gestures of our nation have made us great: When we took refugees, when we accepted asylum-seekers, and when we gave temporary protected status to people fleeing persecution and adverse conditions in their home countries.

All of these humane gestures have given us the greatness that we can call our own. Greatness is not synonymous with wealth. Moral leadership among nations creates true greatness.

Anglican Bishop Mariann Edgar Budde recently demonstrated moral courage by confronting President Trump with truth just after Inauguration Day. Our Holy Father, Pope Francis, in a letter to the U.S. bishops, commends the efforts of many bishops and others to confront this crisis. The most prophetic remark in his letter was, “What is built on the basis of force, and not on the truth about the equal dignity of every human being, begins badly and will end badly.”

“Fortress America” is not a country headed for greatness if it loses its moral conscience. No nation can ever survive and deserve a place among the family of nations without respecting basic human dignity. Hopefully, we will reverse course and learn this lesson before it is too late.

(Bishop Nicholas DiMarzio is the retired bishop of the Diocese of Brooklyn, New York. He writes the column “Walking With Migrants” for The Tablet and OSV News.)

IN EXILE
By Father Ron Rolheiser, OMI
There are times when our world unravels. Who hasn’t had the feeling? “I’m falling apart! This is beyond me! My heart is broken! I feel betrayed by everything! Nothing makes sense anymore! Life is upside down!”

Jesus had a cosmic image for this. In the Gospels, he talks about how the world as we experience it will someday end: “The sun will be darkened, the moon will not give forth its light, stars will fall from heaven, and the powers of heaven will be shaken.” When Jesus says this, he is not talking as much about cosmic cataclysms as of cataclysms of the heart. Sometimes our inner world is shaken, turned upside down; it gets dark in the middle of the day, there’s an earthquake in the heart; we experience the end of the world as we’ve known it.

However, in this upheaval, Jesus assures us that one thing remains sure: God’s promise of fidelity. That doesn’t get turned upside down and in our disillusionment we are given a chance to see what really is of substance, permanent and worthy of our lives. Thus, ideally at least, when our trusted world is turned upside down, we are given the chance to grow, to become less selfish and to see reality more clearly.

Christian mystics call this “a dark night of the soul” and they express it as if God were actively turning our world upside down and deliberately causing all the heartache to purge and cleanse us.

The great Spanish mystic John of the Cross puts it this way: God gives us seasons of fervor and then takes them away. In our seasons of fervor, God gives us consolation, pleasure, and security inside our relationships, our prayer and our work (sometimes with considerable passion and intensity). This is a gift from God and is meant to be enjoyed. But John tells us, at a certain point, God takes away the pleasure and consolation and we experience a certain dark night in that where we once felt fire, passion, consolation and security, we will now feel dryness, boredom, disillusion and insecurity. For John of the Cross, all honeymoons eventually end.

Why? Why would God do this? Why can’t a honeymoon last forever?

Because eventually, though not initially, it blocks us from seeing straight. Initially all those wonderful feelings we feel when we first fall in love, when we first begin to pray deeply, and when we first begin to find our legs in the world. These are part of God’s plan and God’s way of drawing us forward. The passion and consolation we feel help lead us out of ourselves, beyond fear and selfishness. But, eventually, the good feelings themselves become a problem because we can get hung up on them rather than on what’s behind them.

Honeymoons are wonderful; but, on a honeymoon, too often we are more in love with being in love and all the wonderful energy this creates than we are in love with the person behind all those feelings. The same is true for faith and prayer. When we first begin to pray seriously, we are often more in love with the experience of praying and what it’s doing for us than we are in love with God. On any honeymoon, no matter how intense and pure the feelings seem, those feelings are still partly about ourselves rather than purely about the person we think we love. Sadly, that is why many a warm, passionate honeymoon eventually turns into a cold, passionless relationship.

Until we are purified, and we are purified precisely through dark nights of disillusionment, we are too much still seeking ourselves in love and in everything else. Therese of Lisieux used to warn: “Be careful not to seek yourself in love, you’ll end up with a broken heart that way!” We’d have fewer heartaches if we understood that. Also, before we are purified by disillusionment, most of the tears we shed, no matter how real the pain or loss, often say more about us than they say about the person or situation we are supposedly mourning.

In all this, there’s both bad news and good news: The bad news is that most everything we sense as precious will someday be taken from us. Everything gets crucified, including every feeling of warmth and security we have. But the good news is that it will all be given back again, more deeply, more purely, and even more passionately than before.

What dark nights of the soul, cataclysms of the heart, do is to take away everything that feels like solid earth so that we end up in a free-fall, unable to grab on to anything that once supported us. But, in falling, we get closer to bedrock, to God, to reality, to truth, to love, to each other, beyond illusions, beyond selfishness and beyond self-interested love that can masquerade as altruism.

Clarity in eyesight comes after disillusionment, purity of heart comes after heartbreak and real love comes after the honeymoon has passed.

(Oblate Father Ron Rolheiser is a theologian, teacher and award-winning author. He can be contacted through his website www.ronrolheiser.com.)

FROM THE HERMITAGE
By sister alies therese

I have a habit of trying to learn new words every few days. I am not always successful, but here are two I learned on an art app: polloglyphs and pareidolia. The first means hidden images and the second is seeing patterns in randomness. Though they were used to describe an ongoing argument amongst art critics about Jackson Pollock’s work and whether he had things hidden beneath his famous drips, I think they are words that will ‘preach!’

Into Lent, we are confronted with the pain and reality of the Passion of Jesus and our passion. Perhaps we can look for hidden images and some patterns of randomness in suffering, ours and the world.
A few weeks ago, in our readings at Mass, we explored Sirach, a book not found in non-Catholic Bibles and not included in the Hebrew Bible either after the first century. It has always been considered divinely inspired and canonical by Catholics. I have always found it soothing and reassuring. It was written somewhere between 200-175 BCE in Hebrew by Jesus, son of Eleazar, son of Sirach, primarily to present moral teaching to catechumens and the faithful.

The opening strophe, “All wisdom comes from the Lord and with God remains forever,” (1:1) suggests there are things to uncover. “True wisdom is God’s external revelation of Himself. Throughout the book, Sirach describes in great detail just what wisdom is: sometimes it is divine, sometimes a synonym for God’s law; sometimes it is human. But the author makes clear that even human wisdom, properly understood, comes from God.” (footnote, 1:1, NAB)

The revelation of God permeates all things … nature that surrounds us, the universe and the myriad of artistic galaxies, the faces of children, the workers and entertainers, and even ourselves have many hidden images, woven daily as we journey, as we cast off the false self. One of the ways our false self is put away and our transformed true selves emerge is through friendship. Sirach has a bit to say about that. Consider chapter 6.

For Lent you may have given up chocolate, TV, beer, or scanning your phone every three seconds, … consider giving in, giving more, giving, and in that giving, changing … establishing a new friendship! You might discover hidden images; possibly experience pareidolia, those patterns in the randomness of the human condition. Friendship can begin in many ways. Look about when you attend church or a ballgame or an art class. Consider the folks there. Who would I like to get to know? Who would I choose to become friends with? What are your criteria? What are you willing to risk?

That’s one way. But what if you first prayed and asked God to put a new person in your path? What if you asked God to open your heart to folks who are not like you? Oh my. Where would I meet such a person, you wonder, when the church I go to is all the same, as is my grocery store, school or golf course. Where can I meet someone of another faith, ethnic background or age? Where can I learn something new or be challenged in my well-organized heart?

The art argument I mentioned implied that Pollock painted things under his drips, and that if you stared long enough, you would see them. If you paid enough attention, you would see the randomness hidden beneath. If we go with that, how about what happens when we meet a new person … a person so unlike us in gender, color, education or marital status? What wisdom do we need to explore a new relationship?

One difficulty is perhaps that we already have an imagination or thoughts about ‘those kind of people’ … and now when we meet x or y we find those ideas challenged. Those very ideas cause us to review how open or closed our hearts are. Sirach reminded us that all wisdom comes from God. Wisdom is needed in friendship; how do we move in this new way? How do we eat new food, appreciate different clothing, or listen to political or religious differences, and gain wisdom, our growth goal? How do we learn to love?

Perhaps you read Judy Blume’s books? In “Are You There God? It’s Me Margaret,” she writes, “I like long hair, tuna fish, the smell of rain and things that are pink. I hate pimples, baked potatoes, when my mother’s mad, and religious holidays.” This may be her wisdom as an eight- or nine-year-old, but will she stay stuck to those notions or be able to go beyond them and discover what is hidden within?

Lent offers so many opportunities to shed false selves and to allow our true-Godly self to emerge. We can splash around or sit in a puddle and need a time out, or we can be reminded that others and their wisdom and generosity can help us grow. We can indeed learn to love in a whole new way. In John 15:15ff Jesus makes this clear: “This is My command: Love one another the way I have loved you. … put your life on the line for your friends. You are My friends because I’ve let you in on everything I’ve heard from the Father. You didn’t choose Me; I chose you and put you in the world to bear fruit.” (Peterson, “The Message”) So, choose.

BLESSINGS.

(Sister alies therese is a vowed Catholic solitary who lives an eremitical life. Her days are formed around prayer, art and writing. She is author of six books of spiritual fiction and is a weekly columnist.)

FOR THE JOURNEY
By Effie Caldarola

So, a random guy walks into a bar. No, this isn’t the beginning of a joke. For me, it’s a Lenten meditation.
A friend of mine tends bar in a neighborhood tavern. It’s a small place where “regulars” gather. Once, on the rare occasion I visited, I asked for red wine. My friend shook her head. “I wouldn’t order wine here,” she said. Apparently, a bottle of Merlot can sit open for weeks. This is a beer drinker’s haven.

She told me that one night as she stood behind the bar, she was looking at a GoFundMe page for a friend, a young woman diagnosed with very serious cancer. The woman had to quit her job to begin treatment.

A customer my friend didn’t know was sitting at the bar sipping a beer and asked what she was doing. She explained the young woman’s situation. This random guy, a stranger, pulled out two $20 bills and pushed them over to her. Add that to the GoFundMe, he said.

What does this have to do with my Lent? I’ve been thinking about generosity. More specifically, I’ve been pondering spontaneous generosity and what it says about the heart. My heart.

Spring brings two familiar rituals – one, the penitential season of Lent with its many graces. The other, tax season, with its obligations. Although ostensibly very different things, they may intersect at the point where some of us use our charitable donations as deductions.

Tax season holds us hostage to paper, and I’ve carefully recorded the donations my husband and I have made. Again, the intersection: I want a deduction, but I also use this as a time to evaluate my generosity. Were our contributions “enough?” Were they more than last year? Did they reflect our church’s preferential option for the poor? What do they say about our priorities?

But then, a random guy pushes $40 across the bar in a spontaneous act of compassion, and my receipts suddenly seem less important and a bit more calculated. Where, I wonder, is my record of everyday acts of generosity, acts which held no hidden benefit to me except the grace of a God whose generosity is boundless?

I think back to times I’ve failed at spontaneous generosity. I sometimes recall, long ago, a man loitering on the early morning street, me rushing to a coffee shop before a meeting. I had no cash to give him, but later I asked myself why I didn’t offer to buy him a coffee. Maybe a muffin? I had a credit card.

There’s nothing wrong with planned giving. Actually, it’s important. Maybe we tithe, or maybe we choose a sacrifice so that we can give more. In these troubled times, with so many people suffering and even dying because federal contracts to Catholic charities have been frozen, our charitable planning is critical.

But generosity should be a way of life, not just a budget line item. Generosity is stumbling out of bed after a sleepless night and smiling brightly at our family. It’s letting someone else have the last piece of cake. It’s spontaneous compassion on a daily basis, through our time, our words, our resources. Without payback. Just sliding a little cash across the bar.

Did that guy have a sister or mother who struggled with the same cancer? Or did he just have a generous heart? We’ll never know.

People often ask a deacon friend of mine how much they should give, almost as if his answer would justify them. He would always smile and say, “More.” That’s a good daily Lenten mantra. After all, how can we give God less?

(Effie Caldarola is a wife, mom and grandmother who received her master’s degree in pastoral studies from Seattle University.)

IN EXILE
By Father Ron Rolheiser, OMI
During the last years of his life, Thomas Merton lived in a hermitage outside a monastery, hoping to find more solitude in his life. But solitude is an illusive thing, and he found it was forever escaping him.
Then one morning he sensed that for a moment he had found it. However, what he experienced was a surprise to him. Solitude, it turns out, is not some altered state of consciousness or some heightened sense of God and the transcendent in our lives. Solitude, as he experienced it, was simply being peacefully inside your own skin, gratefully aware of and peacefully breathing in the immense richness inside your own life. Solitude consists in sleeping in intimacy with your own experience, at peace there, aware of its riches and wonder.

But that’s not easy. It’s rare. Rarely do we find ourselves at peace with the present moment inside us. Why? Because that’s the way we are built. We are overcharged for this world. When God put us into this world, as the author of the Book of Ecclesiastes tells us, God put “timelessness” into our hearts and because of that we don’t make easy peace with our lives.

We read this, for example, in the famous passage about the rhythm of the seasons in the Book of Ecclesiastes. There is a time and a season for everything, we are told: A time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to gather in what is planted; a time to kill, and a time to heal … and so the text goes on. Then, after listing this natural rhythm of time and the seasons, the author ends with these words: God has made everything suitable for its own time but has put timelessness into the human heart so that human beings are out of sync with the rhythms of the seasons from beginning to end.

The Hebrew word used here to express “timelessness” is Olam, a word suggesting “eternity” and “transcendence.” Some English translations put it this way: God has put a sense of past and future into our hearts. Perhaps that captures it best in terms of how we generally experience this in our lives. We know from experience how difficult it is to be at peace inside the present moment because the past and the future won’t leave us alone. They are forever coloring the present.

The past haunts us with half-forgotten lullabies and melodies that trigger memories about love found and lost, about wounds that have never healed, and with inchoate feelings of nostalgia, regret and wanting to cling to something that once was. The past is forever sowing restlessness into the present moment.

And the future? It impales itself into the present as well, looming as promise and threat, forever demanding our attention, forever sowing anxiety into our lives and forever stripping us of the capacity to simply rest inside the present.

The present is forever colored by obsessions, heartaches, headaches and anxieties that have little to do with people we are actually sitting with at table.

Philosophers and poets have given various names to this. Plato called it “a madness that comes from the gods”; Hindu poets have called it “a nostalgia for the infinite”; Shakespeare speaks of “immortal longings,” and Augustine, in perhaps the most famous naming of them all, called it an incurable restlessness that God has put into the human heart to keep it from finding a home in something less than the infinite and eternal – “You have made us for yourself, Lord, and our hearts are restless until they rest in you.”

And so, it’s rare to be peacefully present to our own lives, restful inside of our own skins. But this “torment,” as T.S. Eliot, once named it, has a God-given intentionality, a divine purpose.

Henri Nouwen, in a remarkable passage both names the struggle and its purpose: “Our life is a short time in expectation, a time in which sadness and joy kiss each other at every moment. There is a quality of sadness that pervades all the moments of our life. It seems that there is no such thing as a clear-cut pure joy, but that even in the most happy moments of our existence we sense a tinge of sadness. In every satisfaction, there is an awareness of limitations. In every success, there is the fear of jealousy. Behind every smile, there is a tear. In every embrace, there is loneliness. In every friendship, distance. And in all forms of light, there is the knowledge of surrounding darkness. But this intimate experience in which every bit of life is touched by a bit of death can point us beyond the limits of our existence. It can do so by making us look forward in expectation to that day when our hearts will be filled with perfect joy, a joy that no one shall take away from us.”

Our restless hearts keep us from falling asleep to the divine fire inside us.

(Oblate Father Ron Rolheiser is a theologian, teacher and award-winning author. He can be contacted through his website www.ronrolheiser.com.)

From the Hermitage
By sister alies therese
Not long until we purple-up and turn our attention more intentionally to the Passion of Jesus. In our tradition, we fast, pray, and give alms and are convinced that we shall make progress, and our improvement will bring holiness. Really? An earlier tradition taught this:
Baal Shem Tov (Poland, d. 1760) (a Hasid or ‘pious one’) taught, “A person of piety complained to the Master, saying, ‘I have labored hard and long in the service of the Lord, and yet I have received no improvement. I am still an ordinary and ignorant person.’ And the Master answered, ‘Ah, yes, but you have gained the realization that you are ordinary and ignorant and that in itself is a worthy accomplishment, is it not?’”

Will I ever be ‘meeked?’ A horse is not meeked to take away its power … no, it is to harness it, moving the animal’s heart from independence to loyalty. In 2019 Maleah (internet) wrote, “Meekness is a superpower developing a focused deliberate center.” This center is our place of prayer and an attitude of meekness reminds us of who our center is.

“To pray is to pay attention to something or someone other than oneself. Whenever one so concentrates attention … and completely forgets the ego, they are praying.” (W.H. Auden, Prayer the Nature of, A Certain World, 1970)

‘Meeking a horse’ comes from Old English and Old Norse. Injukr means gentle … and way back to the Greek praus meaning strength under control. Focused and deliberate. Strong under control.

Behavioral aspects give us a few clues as to how we are doing and though we may remain ignorant and ordinary we can check our tempers, hold back a bad word, or show an engaging smile rather than a wrinkly frown. Aristotle remarked a “praus person has the virtue of the mean between two extremes. The person submits or constrains power for greater effect on self and others.”

Prayer is essential, for to lower oneself before the magnificence of God is to allow ourselves to be meeked into wholesome submission, being transformed moment by moment into the gentleness of God. Another way we express this deliberate and controlled behavior is to let others speak … you listen, and as Carnegie remarked, “do what’s needed.” Sometimes we do not pay attention to what is needed, thinking we can be holy our way. A Sufi story teaches, “There are those in winter who, calling themselves religious say, ‘I shall not wear warm clothes. I shall trust in God’s kindness to protect me from the cold.’ But these people do not realize that the God who created cold has also given human beings the means to protect themselves from it.’”

What do the Scriptures say about being ‘meek?’ Consider both Psalm 37 and Matthew 5:5ff. In Psalm 37 we understand that the meek are the anawim, those overwhelmed by want thus their complete dependence upon God. “Quiet down before God and be prayerful before Him. Don’t bother with those who climb the ladder, who elbow their way to the top. Bridle your anger, trash your wrath, cool your pipes — it only makes things worse.” (Peterson, Psalm 37, The Message)

When Matthew picks these notions up and includes them in the beatitudes, we hear the call of ‘slow to anger,’ ‘gentle with others’ and not striving but accepting. “You are blessed when you are content with just who you are – no more, no less. That’s the moment you find yourselves proud owners of everything that can’t be bought.” (Peterson, MT 5:5, The Message). We are patiently learning to trust and to build up nourishing connections. As with that horse, we develop a partnership.

“Pray simply. Do not expect to find in your heart any remarkable gift of prayer. Consider yourself unworthy of it. Then you will find peace. Use the empty, dry coldness of your prayer as food for your humility.” (St. Makari of Optino) We have the opportunity each day to grow in meekness as we deepen, pray and do what is needed. That is our journey, and we need to make good friends with our horses.

“Grow up gentle and good and never learn bad ways; do your work with goodwill, lift your feet up when you trot, and never bite or kick even in play.” (Anna Sewell, Black Beauty).
BLESSINGS.

(Sister alies therese is a canonically vowed hermit with days formed around prayer and writing.)