Ash Wednesday and Lent are upon us once more, and so a few reflections, observations, questions arise in our dark days….. Considering our times and our world, not a bad idea to see Lent as a kind of diagnostic moment of ourselves and our social situation. Diagnosis means truly examining the symptoms in order to get some kind of handle on the essential problem. In this case a true diagnosis leads to a transformation of vision, not just elimination of symptoms. Can’t confuse the symptom for the essence of the problem. Without a proper diagnosis of where we are and who we are, what Lent calls “repentance” becomes a stumbling around in the darkness of our world, and our focus gets reduced to keeping an “inner scorecard” to make ourselves feel better. True repentance can be called a “return” of sorts to the unspeakable gift of our being, both deeply personal in our hearts and truly collective as we recognize we are fundamentally one; but it is perhaps best seen as a profound transformation of vision. It is the journey from the “You are dust…” of Ash Wednesday to the Mystery of the Resurrection of Easter Sunday.
A few examples of “diagnostic moments”:
- Been reading Wordsworth lately….always been a bit fascinated by the art and literature of what is termed “Romanticism.” Given the times we live in this sure seems like a kind of escapism, right? But consider their times and what was going on in their world about 1800: the beginnings of industrialization, factories, pollution and exploitation of nature emerging on a large scale, Adam Smith and the economics of self-interest, the dominance of materialism and rationalism, etc. The latter affecting even religion and theology where God becomes envisioned and conceptualized as the “Great Clockmaker.” All of creation is simply this mechanical clock made by God and wound up Then He sets it aside and lets it run according to the rules of its mechanism…..the whole universe as a great clock. In any case, the Romantic movement in art and literature is a kind of reaction to all this. I am not a fan of all their ideas, but I am intrigued by their diagnosis of their times and the dominant themes of their culture. They certainly picked up on the toxicity of the new economic and intellectual climate and the total ineffectiveness of institutional religion to deal with this; and their anxiety signals this full blast. But their answers and solutions were not only inadequate but at times actually a part of the problem. Compared with ancient Chinese Taoist poets, for example, who themselves had to often deal with a violent and suffocating social order, the Romantics seem shallow and at times introducing new problems. But they do fulfill Ezra Pound’s famous criterion for the artist and thinker: “A man with a sensitive nose living in a sewer is bound to say something.” Getting back to Wordsworth, lets take a look at one of his short works (the man was way too wordy in his longer works), a sonnet called, “The World Is Too Much With Us.”
The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending we lay waste our powers;
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!
This Sea that bares her bosom to the moon,
The winds that will be howling at all hours,
And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers,
For this, for everything, we are out of tune;
It moves us not. —Great God! I’d rather be
A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn;
So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,
Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;
Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;
Or hear old Triton blow his wreathèd horn.
I gathered from the internet a succinct explication of the poem:
“Composed around 1802 and published in 1807, the poem expresses the speaker’s frustration that people are overly focused on ‘getting and spending’(acquiring money and possessions), and in the process, they ‘lay waste our powers’ and lose their ability to be moved by nature’s beauty.
- Disconnection from Nature: Wordsworth laments that ‘Little we see in Nature that is ours’ because we have ‘given our hearts away’ to modern, trivial concerns. We are ‘out of tune’ with the natural world, failing to appreciate the sea, the winds, and the flowers.
- A ‘Sordid Boon’: The poet calls this focus on worldly gains a ‘sordid boon’ (a wretched blessing), highlighting the irony that what society perceives as progress and advantage is, in fact, a corrupting loss of our deeper spiritual and emotional capacities.
- Yearning for a Simpler Connection: In the poem’s final six lines (the sestet), the speaker expresses a radical wish to be a ‘Pagan suckled in a creed outworn’. This is not an endorsement of ancient religion itself, but a desperate desire for a belief system that would allow him to feel a sense of awe and wonder toward nature again—to see mythical gods like Proteus or Triton rising from the sea—rather than the spiritual emptiness of his contemporary world. “
Yes. Indeed. And this reminds me of a 1981 book by historian and cultural critic Morris Berman, The Reenchantment of the World. Berman’s main thesis: the modern, Western worldview has been “disenchanted” by the rise of a mechanistic science that views the natural world as an object to be analyzed and controlled, a mechanical thing rather than a living system of which humanity is a part. He contrasts this with the earlier holistic and animistic traditions that perceived a vital, integrated connection between humanity and the cosmos, which he terms “participatory consciousness.” (One could also mention here the authentic Native American vision of reality.)
In any case, the diagnosis of the Romantics is definitely on target and impressive in its scope, but it is hard to see how to move from there toward a “cure.” And what kind of transformation of vision do they bring to this problem and from where does this transformation emerge? What kind of social, communal metanoia will enable the healing of human fragmentation? Is the best they have to offer nothing more than a kind of sentimental nostalgia for a fantasized past? It is also interesting to note how the Romantics were early supporters of the French Revolution, but then they had no answer when the violence and terrorism emerged.
- Now I would like to consider two movies. The first movie is “It’s a Wonderful Life.” Ok, this is a classic Christmas favorite (and one of Pope Leo’s favorites), but I would like to reconsider it under the spotlight of Lent and this theme of Lenten diagnosis. I don’t mean to belabor the obvious difference between the town of Bedford Falls and its possible negative transformation into Potterville or the crucial difference between Mr. Potter and George Bailey. What I want to focus on is the transformation inside George Bailey.
When we first meet George as a young man, he is eager to leave Bedford Falls and seek out an adventurous life. He has a certain idea, a certain vision of who he is, of what he should do, of what his personal fulfillment would be, of what the meaning of his life is. George is a good man with a good heart, but he cannot see, to put it simply, the work that God seeks to accomplish through him…the movie of course does not put it this way. Inevitably that work gets done with a lot of felt struggle and frustration on George’s part as he stumbles from one problem to another; but interestingly enough through all that he connects with the love of his life, Mary. But he is still fundamentally blind at this point to the real meaning of his life, unable to even realize that he is afflicted in a manner of speaking. A real crisis brings about a diagnostic moment that leads to a transformation of vision. What was needed was a “transcendent perspective,” and that is provided in the movie by the instrumentality of that marvelous angel second class, Clarence. Here the movie could have slipped into a mawkish, sentimental pop religiosity; but it manages to present it smartly and amusingly. With a transformed vision George finally sees how grace and divine mercy and compassion flowed into his community through him….without of course any explicit religious language.
An interesting sidelight: given the underlying and unspoken spirituality of this movie, it fascinates me that there is also a total silence and absence of formal, institutional religiosity…..no “church moments”! The movie is emphatically pointing at everyday ordinary life as the ground of our transformation.
The second movie is another old classic, “The Grapes of Wrath.” A beautiful and powerful adaptation of Steinbeck’s Depression era novel. It presents the Joad family, poor dirt famers in Oklahoma in the 1930s. Depression and Dust Bowl and money interests back East lead to the loss of their impoverished farm. They become migrants to California in order to find work in California’s agricultural fields. Here I just want a brief focus on two characters: Tom Joad, the eldest son, who has spent prison time for killing a man in a bar fight and has been released to come back home to find his family has to leave their poor home; and then Jim Casy, a former preacher who also hooks up with the Joad family in their migration. Here you find that the diagnosis and the transformation of vision takes place in a slow process, one blurred glimpse of a glimmer after another you might say. But you catch it early in the movie and by the end you notice Tom sees the world around him and his own pain and feelings differently if not yet in full transparency. He has been helped in this regard by that other remarkable character, Jim Casy, family friend and former preacher. They reunite very early in the movie, and move together through the story until Casy is killed by a goon squad attacking a California work camp. At one point in the movie Tom recognizes his indebtedness to Casy:
“That Casy. He might have been a preacher but he seen things clear. He was like a lantern. He helped me to see things clear.”
Toward the end of the movie Tom attacks one of the goons who killed Casy and then flees; and now he knows they will be coming after him. He has to leave the family in the middle of the night, and this is his final talk with his mother:
Tom Joad: I been thinking about us, too, about our people living like pigs and good rich land layin’ fallow. Or maybe one guy with a million acres and a hundred thousand farmers starvin’. And I been wonderin’ if all our folks got together and yelled…
Ma Joad: Oh, Tommy, they’d drag you out and cut you down just like they done to Casy.
Tom Joad: They’d drag me anyways. Sooner or later they’d get me for one thing if not for another. Until then…
Ma Joad: Tommy, you’re not aimin’ to kill nobody.
Tom Joad: No, Ma, not that. That ain’t it. It’s just, well as long as I’m an outlaw anyways… maybe I can do somethin’… maybe I can just find out somethin’, just scrounge around and maybe find out what it is that’s wrong and see if they ain’t somethin’ that can be done about it. I ain’t thought it out all clear, Ma. I can’t. I don’t know enough.
Ma Joad: How am I gonna know about ya, Tommy? Why they could kill ya and I’d never know. They could hurt ya. How am I gonna know?
Tom Joad: Well, maybe it’s like Casy says. A fellow ain’t got a soul of his own, just little piece of a big soul, the one big soul that belongs to everybody, then…
Ma Joad: Then what, Tom?
Tom Joad: Then it don’t matter. I’ll be all around in the dark – I’ll be everywhere. Wherever you can look – wherever there’s a fight, so hungry people can eat, I’ll be there. Wherever there’s a cop beatin’ up a guy, I’ll be there. I’ll be in the way guys yell when they’re mad. I’ll be in the way kids laugh when they’re hungry and they know supper’s ready, and when the people are eatin’ the stuff they raise and livin’ in the houses they build – I’ll be there, too.
Ma Joad: I don’t understand it, Tom.
Tom Joad: Me, neither, Ma, but – just somethin’ I been thinkin’ about.
There’s a Christological feel to Tom’s emerging vision….”whatsoever you do to one of these little ones, you do to Me.”
But the person that Steinbeck definitely created as a “Christ-figure is Jim Casy…..his initials after all are J.C.! And when the goons are about to kill him he tells them, “You fellas don’t know what you’re doin’” (And recall Rene Good’s last words: “I’m not mad at you, dude.”) But Casy is a paradoxical and enigmatic stand-in for Christ—very easy not to see him that way. In his recent past he was a preacher within a crazy, sick fundamentalist religiosity, and he was immersed in a totally distorted reality. But at some point, and It’s hard to say if the social crisis was a catalyst for this, he begins a kind of inner and outer diagnostic journey, and you can see that it will lead him to a profound transformation until his murder cuts it short. Here’s a sequence of quotes from Casy:
“There ain’t no sin and there ain’t no virtue. There’s just stuff people do. It’s all part of the same thing. And some of the things folks do is nice, and some ain’t nice, but that’s as far as any man got a right to say.”
“I gotta see them folks that’s gone out on the road. I got a feelin’ I got to see them. They gonna need help no preachin’ can give ’em. Hope of heaven when their lives ain’t lived? Holy Sperit when their own sperit is downcast an’ sad? They gonna need help. They got to live before they can afford to die.”
“I ain’t gonna baptize. I’m gonna work in the fiel’s, in the green fiel’s, an’ I’m gonna be near to folks. I ain’t gonna try to teach ’em nothin’. I’m gonna try to learn. Gonna learn why the folks walks in the grass, gonna hear ’em talk, gonna hear ’em sing.”
“Casy said gently, ‘Sure I got sins. Ever’body got sins. A sin is somepin you ain’t sure about. Them people that’s sure about ever’thing an’ ain’t got no sin—well, with that kind of a son-of-a-bitch, if I was God I’d kick their ass right outa heaven! I couldn’ stand ’em!’”
“I ain’t sayin’ I’m like Jesus…But I got tired like Him, an’ I got mixed up like Him, an’ I went into the wilderness like Him, without no campin’ stuff…Sometimes I’d pray like I always done. On’y I couldn’ figure what I was prayin’ to or for. There was the hills, an’ there was me, an’ we wasn’t separate no more. We was one thing. An’ that one thing was holy.”
The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.
– Marcel Proust
- Let me start with a simple statement: We are living in a very dark time.
Now the moment we say this we are immediately and implicitly called to two other statements: 1. Please clarify what this means. 2. And what should we do about this?
Last month Rene Good, a mother of 3, was shot in the face and killed by an ICE agent in Minneapolis. A few days later I read an editorial in the National Catholic Reporter that really caught my attention. It opens up the possibility of an authentic diagnosis of where we are as a people, and at least it points us in the right direction for what to do. Here is a large segment of that editorial:
“There are moments in a nation’s life when the future does not arrive as a surprise. It announces itself slowly, unmistakably, through patterns we learn to recognize even as we hope we are wrong. When such a moment finally arrives, it feels less like shock than like confirmation: This is where we were headed.
We are living in one of those moments now.
Another life has been taken by the power of the state. The details of what happened in Minneapolis will be argued. ‘Process’ will be invoked. Investigations will promise clarity at some later date. We have learned this choreography well. What matters more than any single finding, however, is the broader realization that the ground beneath us has shifted — and that we are no longer sure who we are.
This is the question that presses upon us now, and it is not one that can be answered by courts, agencies or elections alone: Who have we become?
Not only as voters or citizens, but as a people. As communities. As moral actors living with one another in public space. What habits have we acquired that allow state violence to pass so quickly from outrage to explanation, from grief to acceptance? What has been dulled in us that once would have demanded pause, humility and restraint?
This is the question that presses upon us now, and it is not one that can be answered by courts, agencies or elections alone: Who have we become?
We have become efficient at absorbing what should disturb us….. This did not happen all at once. It happened through repetition. Through the steady expansion of fear as a governing logic. Through the quiet normalization of force as a solution rather than a failure. Through the constant suggestion that safety requires submission and that dissent is a luxury we can no longer afford.
In time, these messages do more than shape policy. They shape character.
From a Christian perspective, this is the heart of the crisis. The tradition we claim does not begin with the management of fear, but with the protection of human dignity. It does not teach that order justifies violence, or that power is vindicated by its ability to dominate. It teaches that every human life bears an inviolable worth that no authority may suspend for convenience or control.
When a society begins to treat lethal force as an ordinary instrument of governance, it has already surrendered something essential — not only justice, but imagination. It can no longer envision safety without coercion, or authority without threat. Violence becomes thinkable. Then acceptable. Then routine.
We keep saying: This is not who we are. But is that true anymore?
Many Americans now describe a feeling that is hard to name but impossible to ignore: estrangement. A sense of being out of place in one’s own country. Not because of disagreement or political loss, but because the moral language of the nation no longer sounds familiar.
It is as if our very souls have left us. Values once spoken aloud — restraint, accountability, the sanctity of life — now feel quaint, even suspect. Our vice president, who considers himself a committed Catholic of solid standing, calls the ICE shooting a tragedy of the victim’s own making.
That dislocation is not accidental. It is the predictable effect of a culture that treats conscience as an obstacle rather than a guide.
At moments like this, it is tempting to locate responsibility entirely ‘out there’ — in leaders, institutions and systems that deserve scrutiny and resistance. But that is only part of the truth. The deeper danger lies closer to home: in our growing belief that nothing we do can matter, that outrage is futile, that resistance is symbolic at best.
Authoritarianism thrives not only on force, but on resignation.
This is why the most urgent task before us is not simply political opposition, but moral recovery. We must relearn what it means to be a people capable of nonviolent resistance — not as a strategy, but as a way of being human together. Nonviolence insists that we remain morally awake even when power tries to numb us. It refuses the lie that cruelty is inevitable and that dignity is expendable.
Nonviolent resistance begins inwardly, with the refusal to let fear shape our vision. But it does not remain there. It takes public form — in witness, in solidarity, in bodies and voices present where silence is expected. It says, quietly and persistently, that there are lines we will not cross, even if the state does.
History offers no comfort to those who wait for perfect conditions before acting. Every meaningful movement toward justice has begun with people who were uncertain, divided, and afraid — but who chose presence over withdrawal and conscience over convenience……. The problem before us is real, and it is exerting itself forcefully in public life. But the solution does not begin there. It begins in the recovery of belief — belief that conscience still matters, that community still matters, that what we do together can still shape the future.
A nation does not renew itself by force. It renews itself when enough people decide that moral exile is unacceptable — and that dignity, once reclaimed, must be defended in public.
We are, finally, at the crossroads — the one we all knew was coming long before Minneapolis.
What remains unknown is which direction we will take.”
This is good, very good. And you can’t fault it for not going far enough; it is only an editorial of course. But it misses something important by (understandingly) limiting itself to the Rene Good killing. It says: “The problem before us is real, and it is exerting itself forcefully in public life.” “The problem” is not only very real, but it has been “before us” for a long, long time. And where have we been all along, and who have we become in and through all this since…..? It seems we have been at this crossroads many, many time and have done nothing or just shove it under the historical rug. But as even the editorial quietly hints, our diagnosis has to involve both the wide sweep of American history and a deeply personal journey into our own hearts. From this “higher” vantage point the editorial calls for a response of nonviolent resistance to the darkness of our times. Seems simple but it is extraordinarily challenging if you understand what it means. This raises the whole issue far above the level of politics and economics—not that they are unimportant; they are very important. But true nonviolent resistance seeks a transformed vision both of you and your “adversary,” and a transformed sense of our identity as a people. In this sense true nonviolent resistance avoids the pitfalls of mistaking the symptoms for what really ails us. Here on this ground the contemplative and the activist meet, and each contributes something absolutely essential to our common journey and vision.
Since this is a critically important topic and there is much more that is needed to say, this reflection will continue in the next posting. Here let us conclude this part with a quote from one of the master teachers of nonviolence in our era, Thomas Merton:
“We must be wary of ourselves when the worst that is in people becomes objectified in society,
approved, acclaimed and deified,
when hatred becomes patriotism and murder a holy duty,
when spying and delation are called love of truth and the stool pigeon is a public benefactor,
when the gnawing and prurient resentments of frustrated bureaucrats
become the conscience of the people and the gangster is enthroned in power,
then we must fear the voice of our own heart, even when it denounces them.
For are we not all tainted with the same poison?”
From “Emblems of a Season of Fury,” 1963
- Julian of Norwich
I would like to conclude this reflection by pondering briefly on this most remarkable person. Later this year we need to reflect on her at length….she is so amazing, and I am chagrined to see how I have neglected her.
Julian’s years were from about 1343 to 1416. She seems to have lived a good part of her later adult life as a recluse attached to a town church. What is important to our reflections here is that she is a profound exemplar of someone who has seen clear through the obscurity, the chaos, the pain of human misery in action and has come through this with a transformed vision that leaves one speechless.
Julian’s teachings begin and end in joy; she had a deep experiential realization that this was our origin, and this was our destiny. Someone might think that she was simply a deluded religious fanatic, or at best a simple person blind to the “reality” of the world. But she definitely knew the “dark side” of things; she lived in the middle of incredible suffering and instability. Consider: the Black Plague killed about 50% of Europe in those years, and her own town of Norwich suffered the same; the Hundred Years War caused enormous chaos and killed thousands; heretics were regularly burned at the stake, and as one commentator said, “Her cell was within smelling distance of her town’s stake”; economic depression was rampant, the Peasants Revolt, riots and unrest. There is also good indication that Julian was a widow turned anchoress, that she had mothered children and lost both husband and children during the Plague. And she also alludes to the fact of some sort of personal illness that afflicted her. Certainly this was not a setting for an ordinary, cheerful optimism, and there is nothing ordinary about her!
Some theologically trained scholars have said that she deserves to be honored as a “Doctor of the Church.” Her teaching is profound, way beyond standard catechism statements, showing real intelligence with creativity and everyday insight into how people think. Her “theology,” her spiritual writing and insights, comes from her experience and shows both amazing sophistication and comprehensiveness. In her personal piety Julian focused on the Passion of Christ. Modern Christians tend to avoid this in some ways….makes people feel a bit uncomfortable; but for medieval people in Europe it mostly became their main focus, beginning from about the time of St. Francis (recall the Stigmata) to especially the late medieval period.
Normally you would not think of Julian as a “Lenten figure,”….she is not crying out to us, “Repent,”….she does not sound like the Prophets, John the Baptist, or some of the saints. What she brings to us is a transformed vision that transcends the very real limitations of her person, of her situation, of her times….and so also of ours. Her vision encompasses all of creation:
“And in this he showed me a little thing, the quantity of a hazelnut, lying in the palm of my hand, as it seemed. And it was as round as any ball. I looked upon it with the eye of my understanding, and thought, ‘What may this be?’ And it was answered generally thus, ‘It is all that is made.’ I marveled how it might last, for I thought it might suddenly have fallen to nothing for littleness. And I was answered in my understanding: It lasts and ever shall, for God loves it. And so have all things their beginning by the love of God.”
And this:
“The Goodness that is Nature is God. He is the ground, He is the substance, He is the same thing that is Naturehood. And He is very Father and very Mother of Nature.”
But she peers into the darkness of human distortions as history unfolds and she is not afraid to question the Divine Work:
“Ah, good Lord, how could all things be well, because of the great harm which has come through sin to your creatures?”
“…deeds are done which appear so evil to us and people suffer such terrible evils that it does not seem as though any good will ever come of them; and we consider this, sorrowing and grieving over it so that we cannot find peace in the blessed contemplation of God as we should do; and this is why: our reasoning powers are so blind now, so humble and so simple, that we cannot know the high, marvelous wisdom, the might and the goodness of the Holy Trinity. And this is what He means where He says, ‘You shall see for yourself that all manner of things shall be well’, as if he said, ‘Pay attention to this now, faithfully and confidently, and at the end of time you will truly see it in the fullness of joy.’”
For many of us there is an understandable temptation to see our personal history and our collective history as a “tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing”(Shakespeare’s Macbeth). Not Julian. She sees clearly the darkness; she does not say it is “not real.” She knows intimately the reality of pain, suffering, human frailty. But in all this she becomes an incredible beacon of divine light; she becomes the bearer of a transcendent divine gift, what some theologians have called the “eschatological secret”….but she is privy not to WHAT it is but simply that It Is.
“AND thus our good Lord answered to all the questions and doubts that I might make, saying full comfortably: I may make all thing well, I can make all thing well, I will make all thing well, and I shall make all thing well; and thou shalt see thyself that all manner of thing shall be well.”
“See that I am God. See that I am in everything. See that I do everything. See that I have never stopped ordering my works, nor ever shall, eternally. See that I lead everything on to the conclusion I ordained for it before time began, by the same power, wisdom and love with which I made it. How can anything be amiss?”
“But Jesus, who in this Vision informed me of all that is necessary for me, answered and said: It was necessary that there should be sin; but all shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.”
“For this is the Great Deed that our Lord shall do, in which Deed He shall save His word and He shall make all well that is not well. How it shall be done there is no creature beneath Christ that knoweth it, nor shall know it till it is done.”
“Do you want to know what your Lord meant? Know well that love was what he meant. Who showed you this? Love. What did he show? Love. Why did he show it to you? For Love. Hold fast to this and you will know and understand more of the same.”
Hints and traces of this eschatological secret can also be found in various Christian figures…. like Origin, Clement of Alexandria, Isaac the Syrian, Maximus the Confessor, etc.….even Merton and Karl Rahner could be included. And for those of us who call ourselves Christians, this eschatological secret may be the whole point of turning/returning to a nonviolent life.
To be continued…..
Some Lenten homework: Take a look at these two short clips on You Tube.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hE_Tl9ovDIo
and