Reflection for Monday, February 23, 2015

Monday of the First Week of Lent

LV 19: 1-2, 11-18

PS 19: 8, 9, 10, 15

MT 25: 31-46

You shall love your neighbor as yourself.

In the reading today, the Lord reminds Moses of the golden rule that many of us grew up with. We should not lie to our neighbor, or steal from them, or judge them. We should love them as we love ourselves; treat others the way we want to be treated. At first it sounds like a simple task, but we need to remember that our neighbors include those who are not so easy to love. But as God loves each one of us, He calls us to love all others.

Amen, I say to you, whatever you did for one of these least brothers of mine, you did for me.

As we begin this first full week of Lent, we reflect on what we can do for the least of our brothers and sisters. The remaining days before Easter can serve as a time to focus our attention on our neighbors who are marginalized or isolated within the community. Often times these are the people who need our love and support the most. At Saint Louis University, we are often reminded of the Jesuit mission. The Lenten season can serve as a 40-day challenge to further our commitment to live as men and women for others by striving to treat our neighbors as friends.

Jenny Ernst is a senior studying Communication Sciences and Disorders.

Reflection for Sunday, February 22, 2015

First Sunday of Lent
GN 9: 8-15
PS 25: 4-5, 6-7, 8-9
1 PT 3: 18-22
MK 1: 12-15

This Sunday’s readings give a wonderful illustration of covenant.  Through covenants, God communicates to us, redeems us, and guarantees us eternal life.  A covenant is a promise and there are some 321 occurrences of covenant within the Bible.  There is a distinct pattern to a covenant, emphasizing that this promise cannot and should not be broken.  We describe what we have done, we list the obligations between the two (or more) parties, and we talk about rewards and punishments for keeping or breaking our covenants.

I love the response from Psalm 25 today:  “Your ways, O Lord, are love and truth to those who keep your covenant.”  To be in covenant with God, others, and even ourselves is an awesome opportunity and an even greater responsibility.  And this covenant is underscored with love. 

As we begin this season of Lent, let’s think about the covenants in our lives.  This is a perfect time for that reflection on covenant, as we are preparing for the New Covenant between Christ and us.  Perhaps we can incorporate this reflection on our covenants into our daily prayer during Lent.

One way we can reflect is to imagine our own covenants with God.  How is my relationship with God?  What have I done each day that welcomes God into my life?  Have I made any special promises to God?  Are those promises contingent on me getting something in return?  What happens if I break my promise to God?  Focus on the loving relationship you have with God.  Spend some time praying about this and sitting quietly with this.

Another way we can reflect is to pray about our covenants with others?  How are my relationships with others?  What have I done each day that welcomes “the other” into my life?  How can I really take my faith, what I believe, and make a promise to work for justice for “the other”?  How can I walk in solidarity with people and get to know people so that they become part of my loving and intrinsic self, rather than even referring to them as “other”?  Focus on the loving relationship you have or want to have with people you know and even people you don’t know.  Pray about the awesome opportunity to see the face of Christ in everyone you meet.

Finally, take time to reflect and pray about your covenants with yourself.  How am I taking care of myself – body, mind, faith life, spirit?  What have I done each day that welcomes a loving relationship with myself?  Have I made any special promises to myself or do I negotiate with myself?  What happens if I break those promises?  How can I love myself more?  Spend some time praying about this and sitting quietly with this.

Lent promises for each of us some great opportunities to reflect – take the time and the space and promise yourselves that you will follow through!

Sue Chawszczewski is the Director of Campus Ministry.

Reflection for Saturday, February 21, 2015

Saturday after Ash Wednesday
IS 58:9-15B
PS 86: 1-2, 3-4, 5-6
LK 5: 27-32

I recently had the opportunity to travel to Belize, the tiny Central American country bordered by Mexico and Guatemala, with a group of students and professionals from the University.   On one of the final days there, I along with two colleagues, met a local artist and wood carver, named Frank, who was perhaps one of the most Christ-like people I have ever met.   Upon seeing us, Frank immediately jumped up from his workbench, leaving everything behind, and began sharing with us stories about his life and his faith-inspired artwork.  He shared that through his own struggle with cancer, he had come to realize his reliance on God.  As our conversation progressed, it became clear that Frank was a spiritually deep person with a profound trust in God and God’s plan for his life.  Much like Levi in today’s Gospel, Jesus called, and Frank followed.

The key to Levi’s response, and Frank’s, I believe, was a profound sense of humility. On the surface, the story of Levi is a simple story of a call and response.  What lies beneath the surface, however, is the story of someone who had the humility to realize that he was in need of God’s grace and compassion.   Both Levi and Frank were willing to see their own sinfulness. This was the main difference between the scribes and Pharisees and Levi.

Ultimately, Lent is a time for practicing humility.  It is a time for looking inward, for going deeper and for realizing our own need for conversion and grace to be followers of Jesus. 

This Lent, let us recommit ourselves to going deeper- to introspection and humility.  Perhaps by realizing our own need for God’s grace and healing, we, like Levi, may heed the call to follow Jesus.

Ben Smyth is the Manager of the Service Leadership Program in the Cook School of Business.

Reflection for Friday, February 20, 2015

Friday After Ash Wednesday

IS 58: 1-9A

PS 51: 3-4, 5-6AB, 18-19

MT 9: 14-15

Live your life fully and well, declaring the word of God with every footstep, every breath, every hug, every song. Maybe not in the sense of preaching and using “God language” all the time, but by being intentional towards how you treat the God you encounter every day- in people, in nature, and in yourself.  

Lent is a time to acknowledge our crosses, and to carry them in solidarity with Jesus as he carried his to Calvary. Jesus does not call us to fast as a sacrifice for ourselves or as a personal challenge, but rather he calls us to fast from the ways in which we live that separate us from him. That may mean looking inside ourselves and learning to love the God within us despite what we have deemed unworthy of love. After all, if we cannot fully love ourselves, how can we fully love the God that is within us? I think that some of our biggest doubts of faith in God come from our biggest doubts of faith in ourselves. What can we do this Lenten season to embrace our imperfections and love whom God made us to be?

It also may mean turning outward to see how our actions affect the rest of God’s creation. The last bit of Isaiah is very reminiscent to the beatitudes. During this time of year we are called to fast, but not just for the sake of fasting. We are called to fast from the ways we luxuriously live our lives at the expense of others. From where do we buy clothes, food, shoes, electronics, alcohol, drugs? Who is behind the machine producing our luxuries, how are they paid, what are their working conditions? Can we fast from these things so that our fast “releases those bound unjustly” or “sets free the oppressed” or “shares bread with the hungry... and homeless,” or “clothes the naked” and “that does not turn our back on our own” brothers and sisters?

God wants us to look at the crosses and burdens of others, and help carry them right now. The psalm says that God is “not pleased with sacrifices” in the form of burnt offerings, but rather “a heart contrite and humble.” Can we sacrifice the blind eye we turn to our suffering brothers and sisters this Lenten season for a humble and loving heart? We walk in solidarity with Jesus during this time of year, carrying our own crosses so that our eyes may be open to those currently crucified by society. Let us reflect this season on how we can eliminate crucifying others by our lives, and how we can live our lives to take the already crucified down from their crosses.

Emily Haas is a Junior studying Psychology, Spanish, and International Studies with minors in Theology and Urban Poverty Studies. She is currently studying in Argentina.

Reflection for Thursday, February 19, 2015

Thursday after Ash Wednesday
DT 30: 15-20
PS 1: 1-2, 3, 4, AND 6
LK 9:22-25

I have decided of late that I like to play with fire.  This is certainly true in the physical sense as I love what fire does. Fire provides warmth, and there is also beauty in the way that it burns at varying degrees. And chemically it is present both on earth and within the larger universe. But, I am speaking metaphorically as well. Sometimes I play with heart fire and the connectivity through which relationships are made. It is both a dangerous game and an awareness exercise for me, and at the present moment God is teaching me about myself in relationship to fire.

Specifically my prayer life is leading me to more deeply understand the rootedness of broken relationships in the human story, and how false gods and self-centeredness distract us from both reality and the gifts that the Lord wishes to bestow on us in our daily lives. These themes also resound in today’s scripture readings.

In the first reading, we hear “today, I have set before you life and death, prosperity and doom…if you obey the commandments of the Lord…you will live and grow numerous…if, however, you turn away your hearts and will not listen, but adore and serve other gods…you will not have a long life” (Deut. 30: 15-18). And in the gospel Jesus tells us “if anyone wishes to follow after me,” (Luke 9:23) he or she must deny self, take up the cross and follow.

In the Old Testament, the god Ba’al often tempted the Israelites to turn away from God. The first reading today is an exhortation from the Lord that Moses delivers to the people. We might recall the golden calf and think of ourselves more superior, for seriously, who in our time worships a golden calf? Yet, culturally, our era is filled with golden calves that take on different shapes and sizes. We have phones, computers, television shows, other people that we falsely form into gods or goddesses, busyness, and perhaps the most subtle idol of all, our own self-centeredness.

Relational fire is necessary if we are going to connect to each other and to God, for it is in others that we begin to perceive the brilliance of God’s face. But it is also true that our perceptions often miss reality and we fail to see others as they truly are. Sometimes we make people into gods or goddesses while at other times we miss the giftedness present in our brothers and sisters as we focus on our own ailments, struggles and needs.

God invites us into right relationship with the Blessed Trinity, others, and our true self through prayer. The poet James Montgomery (1771-1854) wrote “prayer is the soul’s sincere desire/uttered or unexpressed/the motion of a hidden fire/that trembles in the breast” (1819). The poem continues beautifully and is attached here on YouTube as a hymn.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vtq-pWTKtKM

As we begin this Lenten season, God invites us to put ourselves aside in order that our eyes might begin to see beyond our own plights and worldviews. We begin this Lenten fast with a resolve to be revived back into communion with each other and to God. What are some gods in your life that take away from right relationship with the Lord and others? And how does your Lenten fast reflect your own needs and desires? Let us journey together and pray for new hearts refined as though through fire so that we are able to perceive the world beyond ourselves--a world in great need of transformation and deep love.

Christy Hicks is a Campus Minister in Griesedieck Complex.

Reflection for Wednesday, February 18, 2015

Ash Wednesday
JL 2: 12-18
PS 51: 3-4, 5-6AB, 12-13, 14 AND 17
2 COR 5: 20 - 6:2
MT 6: 1-6, 16-18

A few Lents ago I picked up a book entitled Suspicion and Faith, written by Merold Westphal, who is both a philosophy professor at Fordham and a Protestant minister. The book suggested reading the so-called “masters of suspicion” (Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud, and Friedrich Nietzsche) as a Lenten discipline. I don’t mean doing so as a penance (although most of my friends seem to see that kind of reading as masochistic), but as a kind of whetstone against which to sharpen one’s own practice of the faith, by taking seriously some of the most significant critiques ever pointed at religious belief and practice. The goal is not to land where they landed, rejecting religion, but to take seriously the unhealthy attitudes and practices they saw and recommit to a better, more authentic practice of religion.

Paradoxically, while Westphal certainly gives space for the masters of suspicion to challenge the complacencies in our faith lives, he goes a step further and accuses them of plagiarizing the Bible, which he sees as the most “irreligious” religious book in the world. Today’s gospel is a perfect example: Jesus spends the whole gospel warning people how easily practices that are intended to foster conversion and humility can become sources of self-congratulations, and how easily can practices that are intended to bring us into greater solidarity with others become a painkiller. He suggests that the more modern critiques of religion are in fact simply plagiarizing from Christianity itself (or at least, Christianity at its most honest) in ferreting out all the places where “bad faith” can hide. I have been struck for many years by how much Lent paradoxically says that doing the right thing can be the problem: fast and pray and give alms, but beware. Not that they are bad, but that they are dangerous if we let them create a hierarchy of holiness or righteousness. Is it any wonder that Jesus’ most biting critiques are all aimed at religious authorities, who are perhaps most liable to allowing religious performance to become a means of inflating the ego instead of transforming it?

As much as we might think of Jesus being all about forgiveness and “niceness,” he spent a lot of time challenging people; I suggest that he had no patience with sins of the ego, sins that inflated one’s self-importance and supposed holiness by shows of good deeds or religious observance. However, he was endlessly patient with sins of the shadow - the things that people were ashamed of, the things that rendered them unclean or a public sinner or an outcast.

Perhaps a Lenten goal should be to listen to the things that don’t fit our confirmation bias about ourselves; that doesn’t mean getting sucked into other people’s negativity or making our self-worth depend on other people’s approval, but asking again about motives and motivations that may look shiny on the surface but maybe hide deeper and less pristine impulses. That’s quite different from a “repentance” that just focuses on things we have done wrong - that’s a good thing too, but it just might keep us from seeing the good things which have become a problem for us by giving us space to become complacent, self-righteous or even judgmental.

Patrick Cousins is a member of the Department of Campus Ministry.

Welcome!

Thank you for visiting Campus Ministry's 2015 Lent blog. We hope this series of daily reflections and other resources will aid you in your Lenten observance. Please also visit www.slu.edu/lent for information about additional resources and upcoming events.