by Chris Koellhoffer, IHM March 8, 2019
This is the reality of living in a world both beautiful and broken: that there are some things, perhaps many things, that are far beyond our power to fix and to cure. What are we to do, how are we to be, when the curing and the fixing are not ours to enact, when we’re faced with our inability to save ourselves or others in the ways we desire?
As we enter into the season of Lent, a possible response to these questions lies in a simple Lenten prayer:
“Jesus,
by the power of your holy cross,
may we walk with you as you change the world.”
May we walk with you, Jesus. May we accompany you on your final, painful journey. May we companion you in the crucified peoples of our world, near and far. In other words, may we be present as you are today.
Brother David Steindl-Rast says that “being present means…not only being present to another human being, but present to the water we drink, the flowers we see, to everything that comes our way—every thing, every person, every animal, every plant, every situation in life.”
Perhaps no single thing, he observes, has greater impact on our quality of life than our capacity to be present, moment to moment, as life unfolds. Everything that matters hinges on this capacity that opens the door to meaningful experience. Presence allows us, calls us, to be available to all that life has to offer us.
Recently, one of our Sisters who was on hospice care entered into her final journey, her last days among us on this Earth. She was beautifully accepting and at peace with this reality which none of us had the power to alter. Yet we were not powerless. Every day another of our Sisters would come to visit, sit by the dying one’s bed, and reverently and wordlessly massage her feet. Such a witness before us: holding the grief of the world while at the same time acknowledging the human family’s inability to cure. This was walking with Jesus in his last days. This was embodying the presence of the Holy One. Sometimes the seemingly small gestures are all we can do. And sometimes they are everything.
In Out of Solitude, Henri Nouwen wrote about exactly this kind of tender accompaniment when he observed, “The friend who can be silent with us in a moment of despair or confusion, who can stay with us in an hour of grief and bereavement, who can tolerate not knowing, not curing, not healing and face with us the reality of our powerlessness, that is a friend who cares.”
Mary, the mother of Jesus, knew both the exquisite pain and the absolute joy of accompaniment and presence. We can imagine her encountering her son as he stumbled toward crucifixion. How could she look into his haunted eyes, view his bruised and mangled body, and not want to save him? That his rescue was beyond her power was anguish of the most excruciating kind for her tender, loving heart. And so, she remained. She breathed the energies of compassion toward her beloved son’s wounded body and spirit. She was present to him in the only way possible to her on the Via Dolorosa.
We also know this longing, this collective ache for presence. We see presence embodied when we refuse to be silent and instead cry out as witnesses to the injustice and oppression in our world. When we sit with a family member struggling with dementia and listen with profound attention to the same story we’ve heard ten times already. When we embrace or pray with someone who has just received a diagnosis that turns a world upside down. When we bake a cake or deliver a meal to a grieving family. When it seems there is nothing left to do, there is still everything possible to be: present, faithful, tending to the cries of our world.
Our call, this Lent and always, is to listen to these voices and accompany them. Not to run from them because they make us uncomfortable. Not to avoid them because we have no solutions to offer. But to remain, to stay with, as the Holy One does.
On this Lenten journey and every day, may we be the gate through which Breath enters into and heals the universe. Today and every day, may we become open to the tender Presence that transforms us and changes the world.
Takeaway
Sit in stillness with the Holy One.
Hold in compassionate awareness your family, friends, co-workers, nation, or world community with clear and loving eyes.
What wounds or brokenness—here at home or around the globe–move your heart and cause you to weep?
In the quiet, be a prayerful presence to the suffering of the Holy One in you and in the crucified peoples of our world today.
NOTE:
Thank you for your prayerful support of the day I led for women and men religious of the Dioceses of Brooklyn, NY and Rockville Centre, NY. Special thanks to Maryann Seton Lopiccolo, SC and Pat Moran, CIJ for the invitation. It was my great delight to be in the good company of both new and familiar faces from the NYC/Long Island area.
Now please hold in your prayer a Lenten evening of presentations, “Making Music in a Beautiful, Yet Wounded World,” which I’ll be offering for the National Association of Pastoral Musicians, Scranton Chapter, on March 12.
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