Lent

Lives of three people serve as guides for Lent

By Mike Westenberg

	A Compass Lenten series

Lent calls us to deepen God's presence in our lives. It is a time of self-examination, rethinking our priorities, and putting faith first. Lent can be like spring cleaning - clearing the clutter, dusting out the cobwebs, making new space for God. As we journey together this Lent, let us consider three holy men and women whose lives can serve as models and guides to deepen our prayer this Lent.

St. Therese of Lisieux

St. Therese of Lisieux is sometimes called the "mystic of the ordinary." Her "unspectacular" life makes her especially approachable. Therese did no great deeds, made no great travels, held no prestigious positions. What makes Therese a great model of prayer is her insights about the experience of ordinariness.

Like us, Therese struggled with her faults, failings and frailty, her purpose and vocation. What Therese teaches us is the way of love - a holding to and trusting in faith that God loves us.

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Therese helps us see that prayer is a love-response to God. It is trusting in a God who loves us not for what we do, but rather a God who simply loves - totally, unconditionally. Therese invites us to center ourselves, to trust ourselves to the God who is love.

This Lent, Therese calls us to focus our prayer on God's deep and abiding love for us. God calls us, like St. Therese, to make love our vocation.

St. Francis of Assisi

The Catechism tells us that God's thirsting for a relationship with us causes our own thirst for God. Prayer flows from God's desire to spend time with us. Prayer is our response to God's call to be in relationship (CCC2560,61). Our lifestyle often makes it hard to hear the whispers of God. We are rushed, over-cluttered, overscheduled, frazzled. St. Francis of Assisi invites us to simplicity this Lent.

Like most of us, Francis was born into "the good life." He grew up privileged and enjoyed the benefits of wealth and material comfort. Francis' journey of conversion invites us to peel back and examine the layers of our own lifestyle.

Francis' model of prayer is a conscious embrace of voluntary poverty and communion. It is a conscious letting go of the pursuit of things. In the same way that Francis rejected the wealth and social influence of his family, Francis challenges us to reject the materialism of our own age.

This poverty of spirit transforms our prayer. All things, all power, all creation belongs to God, who shares them with us not so we might possess them, but so we can share them with others. Through poverty Francis found freedom to pray, and discovered the beauty and connectedness of all God's creation.

The prayer life of Francis frees us to become people of gratitude and reverence. This Lent Francis calls us to let go of the pursuit of things and to pursue instead the peace and communion of the kingdom of God.

Dorothy Day

A final person of prayer for us to learn from is Dorothy Day. This co-founder of the Catholic Worker Movement lived the Gospel call of charity and justice. Day worked tirelessly for the poor and destitute.

Like Mother Theresa and others committed to serve the poor, Dorothy Day drew strength from both her personal prayer and the prayer life of the church. She was devoted to daily Eucharist, reading and meditating on Scripture, and reading spiritual classics.

For Dorothy, serving the poor was serving Christ. The service she offered was a prayer - an encounter with Christ disguised in the suffering, the social outcast, the "lepers" of society. Meditation, reflection and humble service all deepened her sacramental sense of Christ incarnate in all things, all persons.

Our church looks to the disciplines of prayer, fasting, and almsgiving to deepen our sense of God during Lent. Therese of Lisieux, Francis of Assisi and Dorothy Day show us that as we free ourselves from materialism, serve Christ in the poor, and give ourselves over to Love, our sense of God's presence in our prayer, our lives, and creation will strengthen and deepen this Lent and always.

(Westenberg is the director of religious education at St. Matthew Parish, Green Bay.)