Each year, Ash Wednesday marks the beginning of Lent and is a 40-day season (not counting Sundays) marked by repentance, fasting, and reflection. The 40-day period represents Christ’s time of temptation in the wilderness, where he fasted and was tempted. Nothing new here! We all know this from our Catholic teachings !
So what are we suppose to reflect on? I was asked by a seven year old to explain what Lent meant. When I told her, I was met with a blank look. Fast? Give up something? Why? When I mentioned repentance I was met with this question “why should we repent being bad if someone was bad to us first?” Needless to say it was kinda futile. Nothing I said made sense to a seven year old...honestly it wasn’t making much sense to me either! But it did make me think.... As we enter this particular Lenten Season, I am guessing we have a lot to reflect on, or contemplate. This past year in particular has been hard for so many, and in some ways feels like we have been living Lent for 365 days and counting!
That brings me to a paper I read years ago by Thomas Berry. In 1978 he wrote a paper entitled Contemplation and World Order. ( you can access the paper by going to the Thomas Berry Foundation’s web site. thomasberry.org)
Fr. Thomas wrote, “If contemplation is to lead an individual to a personal transforming experience of the divine, this can be accomplished in a great diversity of spiritual disciplines. There is no need to avert to the condition of the world, whatever it is. The less attention to the world the better. But if contemplation is to advance the peace and order of the world in some direct manner, it requires more careful consideration of just what is dysfunctional in the world and how this can be remedied.”
In his paper, Thomas seems to make a pointed difference between having a personal contemplative experience of the divine and a contemplative experience that may have impact on more then just the Divine/self relationship. “it requires more careful consideration of just what is dysfunctional in the world and how this can be remedied.”
We have plenty to consider... Severe Climate Disruption, with much of the country plunged into freezing temperatures this Ash Wednesday, in India melting glaciers in the north. All these “Warnings” telling us that climate change is headed to a place of no easy return and may never return to what we knew at all. Political upheaval and unrest, a frightening turn toward authoritarian rule, white supremacists with their hateful slurs and violence, a pandemic killing thousands of citizens around the world , and economic uncertainty for so many.
It seems like all of us could use a quiet moment of blissful silence. 40 days in a safe prayerful space looks good right now... Monastery’s were known for keeping that space. Meditation, contemplation, The dictionary says contemplation is: concentration on spiritual things as a form of private devotion, a state of mystical awareness of God's being. It is more important then ever that monasteries exist, we need monasteries to hold that space, it is why Fr. Thomas founded GMM with us. But as Thomas said, contemplation requires more if it is to advance the peace and order of the world. In many ways we are faced with overwhelming dysfunction everyday, it is painfully uncomfortable, and although it may seem that everything has shifted over night, the truth is that what we find ourselves facing has been a long time coming.
An example is that earthquakes hit with lightning speed, and feel like they come out of nowhere shaking and destroying buildings and landscapes alike in a matter of moments. What scientists have discovered is although earthquakes may seem instantaneous, they are often preceded by much longer, slow-moving, disruptive rumblings sometimes twenty miles beneath Earth’s surface, far too deep to be felt as we go about out daily lives, and yet there they are... we just don’t feel them.
If we are to dig ourselves out of the mess that has sent shockwaves through the streets here at home in the US, and around the world over the past four years, contemplation will play an important roll. If we are to stem the hands of time in our race against climate change we, as a society, as people of prayer have to face some hard realities truthfully. What is happening didn’t start with QAnon and red MAGA hats, what we are experiencing on both the National and world stage has happened in part because of us all, many disastrous and painful realities have been buried below the surface of our societies, some smoldering and festering for over 400 years.
So I end with Fr. Thomas’s words ... “if contemplation is to advance the peace and order of the world in some direct manner, it requires more careful consideration of just what is dysfunctional in the world and how this can be remedied.”