Open Wide my Heart
A Reflection on Lent and Community, by Michelle Scully
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I would not go as far as saying that I like Lent, but I will say that Lent fascinates me. Growing up in Sunday school and youth groups and campus ministries there was a type of excitement around hearing what others were going to “do for Lent” - not eat chocolate! not drink coffee! not sleep in a bed! only take cold showers!
In recent years, I’ve felt more and more a tension moving into Lent, and what I felt was the expectation of the denial I was supposed hold and suffering I was supposed to impose on myself in order to grow towards God in holiness. It felt like a splitting of attention, especially as I was raising small children - what I was told that I should do to grow in holiness felt totally disconnected to the life I was a part of.
Earlier this week, in a Lenten conversation between the current Benedictine Peacemakers and some of the Erie Benedictine Sisters, Anne McCarthy, OSB noted that in a monastic understanding of lent, hermit monks encountered asceticism through heightened discipline and denial. In cenobitic (communal) monasticism, however, Sister Anne pointed out that the main asceticism is community life.
For monks, living in close proximity to one another (often over decades), learning and growing and changing with each other, and seeking God together, creates a life full of moments that scrape and rub and shape one another in love.
For all of us, the communities and relationships that we exist in are moments of encounter and growth. Our communities (families, neighborhoods, roommates, religious communities) are not groups that we need to separate ourselves from in order to “achieve” holiness, but rather opportunities to be places of deep love, in which a God who is love will be encountered.
I think that many of us were taught in our parishes and other avenues of religious formation to enter into Lent as if we were hermits (or some more exacting interpretation of a hermit’s life) - denying ourselves bodily things with that “offering it up” bringing us closer to God in some way. In my experience, what this has done is create an inward-facing penitence that requires a bit of mental gymnastics to be about anything other than myself and how I feel about myself - I have spent years thinking that I need to shrink myself in order to make room for God.
If we could shift to a more cenobitic, communal, understanding of Lent perhaps it would be this; we do not need to manufacture suffering in order to encounter God in it. Rather, we need to de-center ourselves in order to be present to the suffering that exists. One of the antiphons that is sung in prayer with the Erie Benedictines proclaims “open wide my heart, so that the suffering of the world may come in.” Every time I pray it, I’m not sure that I want to because of what that prayer asks of me.
Faith in an abstract is much easier than the messiness of encounter with others and with God. I ask of myself, and I encourage you to ask of yourself; Are the Lenten practices I’m taking on this year leading me to encounter God in love and in community? I am facing inward in a way that is actually avoidant to the ways I’m being called to love?
In this time, in this place, in this beginning of Lent, I find myself drawn to the words of Br. Andrew-Thomas in his recent piece on St. Benedict, as he notes:
Fragile times tend to oscillate between urgency and collapse. Everything feels either critical or impossible. Benedict refuses both. He does not rush transformation. He does not dramatise failure. He expects people to falter — and builds a structure that can hold them when they do.
Stability is central here.
To stay is Benedict’s most radical demand. To remain in a place, among particular people, with one’s own limits and habits exposed. Stability prevents escape disguised as discernment. It forces attention to what is actually present rather than what might be imagined elsewhere.
My prayer for us all this Lent is that we have the courage to show up to our lives and communities as they are and as we are. That we make space in our hearts to encounter the sufferings around us, encounter them with love and steadfastness, and together grow with God.
AUTHOR
Michelle Scully is the program and events coordinator for the Benedictine Sisters of Erie, and director of the Benedictine Peacemakers Monastic Immersion. Contact her if you are interested in contributing a piece to this space.
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Thanks
I appreciate the questions you ask yourself-and for us as well. I goes hand in hand with shadow work I am doing and what it is I avoid rather than welcome. Thank you for adding to this holy enlightenment!