VIEW FROM THE PEW
It’s almost a given that talking about plans for the long road ahead toward Easter will be about the “give ups.” Even Pope Francis discussed giving up personal electronics and social media during Lent.
I was going to joke about exempting myself briefly from a vow to give up pastries because there was a hot cross bun on offer on Ash Wednesday and that’s kind of a religious observance, right? Truth be told, it was a pretty bad bun and could qualify as a penitential experience. And I will abstain from naming the bakery out of an abundance of Christian charity.
Riding that not-so-spiritual brainwave brought me to wonder how to give up contact with a particularly pushy person whose very presence has become a sour note and probably an occasion of sin on Sunday mornings. But to implement that would mean the sacrifice of moving from my favorite pew, maybe even into a different church. Clearly, what I should be giving up is my pride and impatience, but it’s early days in the season. Then, something or someone (guardian angel? Holy Spirit?) nudged me into reading a description of an Orthodox Church tradition.
Eastern rite Christians start their observance of Great Lent on Forgiveness Sunday in a very public and personal affirmation of repentance. At the evening vespers service, members line up to approach the priest and say “Forgive me, a sinner” to which he replies: “God forgives, and I forgive.” Then each forgiven person lines up beside the priest, so the farther back in line you are, the more fellow parishioners you would have to make eye contact with and ask forgiveness. Handshakes, hugs and kisses usually punctuate the solemn exchange.
“It is remarkable just how much is communicated in that awkward, emotional and hope-filled receiving line,” wrote Julie Schumacher Cohen, in a 2018 “Faith in Focus” column in the Jesuit magazine America. “In those brief exchanges, we are not able to work out all of the sins and slights that may have built up over the year, and we are not able to test the sincerity of the other’s plea. Nonetheless, it is an important and visceral step toward the other; an invitation to, and entering in, of God’s grace. We look for the best in the one we forgive and seek to give a charitable interpretation of the other’s intent.
“Whatever is going on in the world around us and in our own little worlds, this ritual breaks in with a reminder of transformational love and the possibility of reconciliation,” wrote Cohen, who “wished there was a way to bring the annual Lenten practice to my social media feeds and to our country.”
Whew, can you imagine doing that? I mean, we have a similar painful experience at the Lenten communal penance service. Queueing up to confess to priests in different corners of the church, you don’t make eye contact with each other and stay back far as possible to avoid overhearing anything. Just looking the priest in the eye and verbalizing your sins is excruciatingly humbling. Could I even face my nosy, noisy nemesis with an appeal to “forgive me.”
The pope’s advice
Speaking of noisy, Pope Francis told the Ash Wednesday crowd at St. Peter’s Square that “Lent is a time to disconnect from cell phones and connect to the Gospel. It is the time to give up useless words, chatter, rumors, gossip and talk and to speak directly to the Lord.” The pope reminded about 12,000 pilgrims that Jesus went into the silence of the desert for 40 days to prepare for his public ministry and that Lent is a time to seek a place of silence where we are free to experience a dialogue with the Lord, according to the Vatican News report.
Quiet time, our version of solitude in the desert, could increase our sensitivity to those who are crying out for help, he said. “Even today, close to us, there are many deserts, many lonely people; they are the lonely and abandoned. How many poor and old people live near us in silence, marginalized and discarded.”
Silence, yes, that’s what I’m talking about. Before even entering it myself, why not weaponize that message. What if I print out the Vatican news release and hand it to the source of chatter and beeping cellphone in a nearby pew?
So I started out this Lent in a muttering, judgmental, not-very-Christian mode. But then on Day 4, the first reading from Isaiah went, “If you remove from your midst oppression, false accusation and malicious speech … then light shall rise for you in the darkness.” And on March 3, it was the Gospel passage about Jesus teaching the apostles how to pray. After the familiar line “forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us,” the Lord doubles down with: “If you forgive men their transgressions, your heavenly Father will forgive you. But if you do not forgive men, neither will your Father forgive your transgressions.” And this Saturday, it’s Jesus telling us if you are angry at someone or call that person a fool, don’t even think about bringing a gift to God’s altar until you “go first and be reconciled.”
Oh, I know I’m having a slow start on this long spiritual hike; time to refocus, to recognize that it’s my own cranky voice that’s shattering the silence. It’s time to forget about the maple-frosted donut I’m avoiding and think of people who are hungry and their fasting is not by choice.
Prayer and fasting are the facets of Lent that get predictable attention from homilists, and religious education leaders and from writers like me. Meanwhile “almsgiving is the under-practiced, under-encouraged Lenten discipline,” said an editorial in the Feb. 17 issue of America.
The Jesuit magazine’s editorial writers quoted some of the dozens of times Scripture urges us to give to the poor. In the Old Testament, Tobit tells us that “almsgiving delivers from death and keeps one from entering into darkness” and Sirach commands: “Do not grieve the hungry, nor anger the needy … a beggar’s request do not reject, do not turn your face away from the poor.”
But nothing else in the Bible can match Jesus’ call to charity and love we heard in the March 2 reading from the Gospel of Matthew. He told us to feed the hungry, welcome the stranger, clothe the naked, care for the ill, visit the prisoner. “Whatever you did for one of these least brothers of mine, you did for me,” he told his disciples. It’s not a warm and cheery message because it ends “What you did not do for one of these least ones, you did not do for me. And these will go off to eternal punishment, but the righteous to eternal life.”
The America editors said charitable giving would be all the more meaningful “if the alms that we give come from money saved by giving up forms of amusement or self-gratification” such as concert tickets or a streaming online service or rich, luscious food. “In truth, many people in this country already go without these luxuries in order to provide for basic necessities. Lent is a time for Catholics not only to pray for those in need but also to give alms and help alleviate the suffering of the poor.”
Piggy bank for charity
Most local parishes are offering an easy way to do that, complete with the visual aid of a simulated rice bowl that doubles as a donation bank. Bishop Larry Silva’s first Lenten letter to the faithful promoted the Catholic Relief Services Rice Bowl project which is endorsed by the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops. One fourth of the funds collected here will go to the diocesan social ministries project “One Ohana: Food and Housing for All” and the rest to global relief efforts. Bills, coins and checks can be slipped into the bowl throughout Lent, a way to focus children as well as adults, a place to put the price of a sweet treat, a clever spin on the idea of a piggy bank.
Holy Spirit Parish/Newman Center at the University of Hawaii is one of the parishes adding a hands-on element to almsgiving. Donations of toiletries, first aid items, non- perishable food, will be collected throughout Lent. The college students will stuff items into “blessing bags” for the homeless. Some bags will be delivered to Wallyhouse, a Kalihi homeless outreach center established by parishioners Wally and Kay Inglis.
“We will also distribute them to the homeless on the street,” said Father Alfred Omar Guerrero, pastor. “I want students to see the homeless are a reality, are real human beings. It’s an awareness of the rights and dignity of the human person. We are made in God’s image and likeness and God dwells within us. We have to respond with our hands and our feet.” Guerrero said the call to charity at Lent is important for student parishioners, who have “grown up in the materialist culture where it is essential to have everything and are at a time of life to make their own life, their own choices. I want to journey with them.”
Newman Center will also have a Hawaii Blood Bank drive on April 1, almsgiving of a scientific sort and a practical way to memorialize that “Jesus shed his blood for us,” said Guerrero.
Something within us all
In his Ash Wednesday homily, Father John Keenan reminded the Newman Center crowd that the idea of giving to the needy is not exclusive to Christians. “Other religions may not call it what we do. There is something within us all; we can’t be in the world alone, we are called to be in communion with other people. It is an innate desire.” Keenan said “Lent is not an endurance race” but a season to take the time to contemplate that “we are weak, very fragile, there is more emptiness than fullness. God sees that we are imperfect. God tells us ‘I want you to live because I love you.’”
They don’t express their outreach to the poor in the same way we Christians do, but it is a tenet of the three Abrahamic faiths which teach there is one God. Muslims, who will begin their month-long Ramadan fast a few days after we celebrate Easter, believe almsgiving is a religious obligation. Called “zakat” and translated as “that which purifies,” it is one of the five pillars of the Islamic faith.
The Hebrew word “tzedakah … signifies charity and translates as righteousness,” a Jewish friend told me, as we compared notes. It is a component of various Jewish holiday traditions and the bar/bat mitzvah ceremony for teenagers making the passage to adulthood. Complying with God’s commandment, called a “mitzvah,” can be volunteer work, special projects to help people, monetary donations. “We believe that the world is a broken place and it’s our job to repair it,” said Rachel Williams Sarashon, born in Hawaii, now living in Portland, Ore. “We are all responsible.”
Well, that search for ideas about Lent brought me a long way from the sweet roll marked with a cross, a clever marketing device dating back to the Middle Ages. Maybe I’ll redirect my routine investment in sweets into some food gift cards to give those folks at the curbside. Maybe when I pray for those worse off than me, I’ll also send a check or a bag of food in their direction. Maybe I’ll find a way to welcome the annoying someone to share my pew. Maybe this will be the Great Lent for me.
