For my Lenten reflection this year, I am reading, once again, Returning: God’s Love calls us home by Henri Nouwen.

I first received Nouwen’s text during Lent in 2004 when it was distributed to our Arrupe community. Since then, I have returned to it each Lenten season, using his reflections for the days of Lent for my own prayer and recollection at this time. Each yearly repetition has allowed me to go deeper into myself and my relationship with God at this joyful time of turning over and coming home with trust and joy in the Lord, which I’d described Lent as in my previous post. Nouwen’s reflections also allow me to face more honestly the light and darkness within me as I try to stand more truthfully before our loving God and the people I live and work with these days to see how much more growing up I have to do as a person, a Catholic Christian and a Jesuit.

Nouwen’s theme for this first week of Lent is “Letting Go.” He writes:

‘Not my will, but yours be done.’ That prayer of Jesus in Gethsemane is difficult—but it is the most important prayer we can pray. Indeed, it is the essence of prayer. Learning to surrender our will, learning to ‘let go,’ is the ultimate goal of all Lenten devotion.

I resonate with Nouwen, as I do too with his observation that human beings never find it easy to let go and let God lead. This act of abandoning ourselves into God’s hands demands so much of us, who want, more often than not, to do and have things our ways, even as we profess we believe in God and know that God expects better of us in following the way of Love and Goodness. There are times when I am guilty of this self-centered disposition, as I think so many of us will also admit to, especially, in Lent when we pause to take stock of ourselves and God’s place or role in the lives we live. Yet, this spiritual attitude of letting go and letting God take charge, Nouwen points out, is something we all desire, and can hope to attain when we truly believe that God is pure love.

He ends today’s reflection with the prayer of abandonment by Charles de Foucauld that he writes “expresses beautifully the spiritual attitude I wish I had [and] I still pray for it, even though the words do not yet fully come from my heart.”

Perhaps, we too can join Nouwen in de Foucauld's prayer so that these words will one day come fully and truthfully from our hearts:

Father,
I abandon myself into your hands.
Do with me what you will.
Whatever you may do, I thank you.
I am ready for all. I accept all.
Let only your will be done in me and in all your creatures.
I wish no more than this, O Lord.
Into your hands, I commend my spirit.
I offer it to you with all the love of my heart.
For I love you, Lord, and so need to give,
to surrender myself into your hands without reserve,
and with confidence beyond all questioning because you are my Father.
Amen

photo: david niblack

Lord, you are merciful to all, and hate nothing you have created. You overlook the sins of men and women to bring them to repentance. You are the Lord our God.

Lent is a special time when the Church reminds us to appreciate anew the many subtle signs of God’s love in our lives. We are asked to see with gratitude the goodness of God in all that we are and have in this existence. We are then invited to examine our lives honestly and to see in what ways our present lifestyles are less than the fullness of goodness we are called to live. This reflection can help us realize anew that we can better live the Good Life intended for us with hope and happiness by turning over a new leaf in areas where we are less than good.

The image of turning over a new leaf is most expressively intertwined with the image of coming or returning home. Richard Pindell’s short story, “Somebody’s Son,” about the runaway David’s homecoming captures this image of turning over anew as coming home vividly.

David wrote to his mother asking if his father would accept him again after his act of running and staying away from the family. In the letter, David asked his Dad to tie a white cloth to the apple tree in the field next to their home if he accepted him home. On the train going home, David is apprehensive, even fearful. His anxiety increases as the train rounds a bend beyond which the apple tree would be visible. He is so apprehensive that he turns to a stranger and asks him to watch for the white cloth. David is too afraid to look; he closes his eyes. Then, he hears the stranger’s exclamation, tinged with surprise and an overwhelming sense of bewilderment: “Why son, there’s a white cloth tied to practically every branch!”

We can imagine the ending to this story: David’s forgiving and accepting father welcomes him with open arms, embracing him with the overflowing love of one who knows what it is to have that which is most precious in his life, his child, back in his arms.

The Evangelist Luke also presents a beautifully moving image of the father as the God who runs not only to meet and welcome us, his children, who return from our wanderings afar and astray, home but to bestow upon us, once again, our rightful identity and inheritance. Luke presents us with a portrait of the prodigal father, the one who lavishes generously all that he has on his child, keeping nothing for himself. The father's loving act dispossesses himself of everything in favour of his child's wellbeing.

Lent points us to the God who is prodigal too: God is the prodigious One who gives his Son for humankind’s salvation gratuitously, expecting nothing in return. The Easter mystery, which lies on the horizon of our Lenten journey, speaks of the goodness God sees in humankind and that Jesus willingly dies to save. We recall this each time we read the psalmist who answers his own cry, “what is man that you should keep him in mind, mortal man that you care for him?” with this truth that we too can utter today: “you made him little less than a god; with glory and honor you have crowned him” (Ps 8).

artwork: charles mackesy