Pope Francis has asked that in this Jubilee Year “the season
of Lent…be lived more intensely as a privileged moment to celebrate and
experience God’s mercy” (Lenten Message of Pope Francis, 2016). This statement of the Pope caused me to
ask: What is the context for
experiencing God’s mercy? What demeanor
or interior attitude do we need, which enables the mercy of God to work its
salvation in our lives?
Ash Wednesday opened Lent with the passage from the prophet
Joel: “Rend your hearts, not your garments” (Joel). And then the psalm verse: “Today if you hear
God’s word, harden not your hearts” (Psalm 94).
This to me gives us the key: the breaking open of our hearts, the
breaking open of those hardened places, then mercy will flow where it was not
before. Is the rending or breaking open
of our hearts something we truly desire or long for? If we do then we are to choose it: ‘Choose
life’…choosing life is to have those hardened spaces broken open so that more
of the life of God can prevail. The
outcome: we will be more Christ-like in love and forgiveness.
Lent is a time of preparation for Easter. This great feast of the Church is to live on
in each one of us as we follow the One who goes before us and walks along our
side manifesting the resurrected life that has burst forth from the bonds of
death. Pope Francis in speaking of God’s
covenant with humanity refers to it as a “history of mercy” where God is “ever
ready to treat his people with deep tenderness and compassion”. And this history of mercy, this ‘love story’,
as he calls it, “culminates in the incarnation of God’s Son”, who became, in
the words of Pope Francis, “mercy incarnate”.
To repeat the invitation of Pope Francis: we are to live
this Lent more intensely as a privileged moment to experience the mercy of
God. Mercy incarnate: Jesus is
extending, offering mercy to each one of us.
St. Benedict in his chapter on the observance of Lent (#49) invites us
to do ‘something extra’ beyond the usual that is asked during this Lenten
season. What extra will we each do that
will help us experience and receive the mercy of God? I looked at my past chapter talks for this
first Sunday of Lent in 2015 and 2014.
It was not surprising to see that I referred in both these years to the
theme of ‘conversion’ and to the breaking open of our hearts. It seems to me that we can not speak of
‘conversion’ unless we speak about the heart…The temptations of Jesus tell us
that evil looms, never far away from the hovering Spirit of Love and
Mercy. And we know that all the stuff we
see in others or in our world: jealousy, self-righteousness, envy, greed,
misuse of power, oppression, racism, potentially can rule us at any
moment.
To get a little more concrete about what it means to break
open the heart: When I notice that I feel hurt by someone or something, what do
I do with the hurt? Does it fester into
reactivity or some kind of lashing out at another person? What if I suffer the hurt, letting it pierce
my heart into an understanding of what is happening, a feeling-knowledge, then,
suffering until I experience the merciful Presence, the Presence that opens a
way to return to my sister or brother and reconcile with him or her. Let us, then, pay special attention to the
heart so that those realities that pull us away from God and from life may be
converted by mercy and the humility that is a strong medicine against any evil
inclination.
Sr. Maria Boulding writes: “In that brokenness he (Jesus)
became the place where the glory of God is revealed…where the meaning of love
is disclosed, the love that holds nothing back” (Gateway To Resurrection,
p.14). This is whom we are following
and, as his disciples, our lives must do as he did: as our hearts are broken
open a little more during this Lent indeed the glory of God will be revealed
and we will rise with Jesus into new life, into new, more expansive horizons
where God’s mercy and forgiveness, peace and justice reign.
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