Living Lent in 2024
By Fr. Kevin Walsh, Director of Vocations
Chapter 49 of the Rule of Saint Benedict tells us:
- The life of a monk ought to be a continuous Lent.
- Since few, however, have the strength for this, we urge the entire
community during these days of Lent to keep its manner of life most pure - And to wash away in this holy season the negligences of other times.
- This we can do in a fitting manner by refusing to indulge evil habits and by devoting ourselves to prayer with tears, to reading, to compunction of heart and self-denial.
- During these days, therefore, we will add to the usual measure of our service something by way of private prayer and abstinence from food or drink,
- So that each of us will have something above the assigned measure to offer God of his own will with the joy of the Holy Spirit (1 Thess 1:6).
- In other words, let each one deny himself some food, drink, sleep, needless talking and idle jesting, and look forward to holy Easter with joy and spiritual longing.
- Everyone should, however, make known to the abbot what he intends to do, since it ought to be done with his prayer and approval.
- Whatever is undertaken without the permission of the spiritual father will be reckoned as presumption and vainglory, not deserving a reward.
- Therefore, everything must be done with the abbot’s approval.
Our lenten practices flow from this understanding that lent is not a period of treating oneself harshly, but rather is a time of grace for growth and to renew one’s desire to live for God.
At Mepkin, each of us is given a lenten book, blessed by Father Joe (our superior), and received during a brief prayer service when he hands each of us this book, having explained that the time each day from Vespers to Compline will be the community’s period for reading. Having a time when we are all reading helps build the bond of community affirming that we are not hermits living on the same piece of property, but we are cenobites – men called to live together helping one another make an individual and a collective response to God’s call, supporting one another in seeking God. Saint Benedict tells us God wishes to expand our minds and hearts. This custom of reading as a community, also offers us the means for each of us to grow individually beyond what we already know, while strengthening our understanding that God wants us to encourage and help each other. To love as Jesus teaches, summons us to become more deliberate in being conscious of receiving love from God and neighbor, while we grow in realizing that we are being invited in all our daily experiences to love God and neighbor.
Walking with the postulants and novices of our community, I am grateful to have received the book “Diving for Pearls, exploring the depths of prayer with Isaac the Syrian”. This seventh century lover of God offers us texts that continue to foster the deepening of one’s desire to live more fully in God and for God.
The author of this book, Andrew Mayes, provides questions with each chapter to help us appropriate the richness of Isaac’s teachings on prayer and help us relate his experience to our experience.
As part of our expression of gratitude as celebrate the 75th anniversary of the founding of Mepkin (which we will conclude in November with a visit by our abbot general, Dom Benardus Peeters, OCSO), we have been having a series of presentations.
Last Saturday Russel Siler Jones spoke to us about “Nourishing what Nourishes” and invited us to reflect on the capacity within us for relationship with God. Coincidentally, I found Dr. Jones’ material as he spoke about “capacity” relating to material I was reading from a Cistercian monk, Father Placide Deseilles, in his work “Principles of Monastic Spirituality in the Cistercian Tradition.” In Part 2 on the theology of the spiritual life, writing on the redemptive economy, Father Placide tells us: “Through Adam’s sin human nature was deprived of the true and eternal life which had been given at the beginning. The image of God, however, was not entirely destroyed in man. He is still free and remains radically ‘capable’ of God, by free ‘consent’ to His will. But the fundamental capacity will become actual again only by means of a free initiative on the part of divine mercy.”
Lent invites us to reflect on our need for God’s merciful love and this reality that we can choose God, choose God’s way, become more fully who we have been created with the potential to become. Lent exposes us to the privilege and responsibility of our free will and this capacity for holiness.
Let me conclude my offering of some thoughts as we journey this lent, calling your attention to these words of Gertrude of Helfta:
“A fish cannot drown in water,
A bird does not fall in air.
In the fire of creation,
gold does not vanish,
the fire brightens.
Each creature God made
must live in its own true nature,
how could I resist my nature,
that lives for oneness with God?”
