My life and my death are not purely and simply my own business. I live by and for others, and my death involves them.

Thomas Merton, Contemplation in a World of Action

When my youngest sister, Judea, was three years old, she refused to hold anyone’s hand when crossing the street or walking on a busy sidewalk. Instead, she would stubbornly declare in her tiny voice, “I hold my own hand!”

There is a temptation to begin the season of Lent as a solitary journey, to hear the words “Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return” as an individual invitation instead of a communal one. Yet, the prayer that proceeds the marking of ashes on our foreheads begins, “Almighty God, you have created us out of the dust of the earth.” It offers a poignant reminder of our common bonds of birth, breath and death.

Despite this era of great divisions and an epidemic of loneliness, the Holy Spirit is here among us. I wonder how the Spirit might move during this season of Lent if we approach the spiritual practices of self-examination and repentance as a common endeavor instead of a solitary one. What if we sought to make a right beginning, traveling the Lenten wilderness together for the express purpose of being re-bound to each other and all of creation through Christ? What if we spent this season together in prayer, fasting, self-denial and reading and meditating on God’s holy Word, boldly considering how we can right the wrongs and sins of the past and strive to repent of those sins and any we have continued to commit?

We never let Judea cross the busy street or wander the crowded sidewalk alone. We walked alongside her, behind her and with her, gently guiding her by the elbow when needed (she was holding her own hand, after all) and reminding her that her journey was also our journey and that we would all get where we were going—together.

For Reflection
This Lent, what spiritual practice could your community adopt as a communal endeavor? How could we travel the wilderness together with intentionality?

Monastic spirituality says we are to honor one another. We are to listen to one another.

Sr. Joan Chittister, The Rule of Benedict

When thinking about writing a series of devotions for Lent, my first thought was of the wilderness. After all, Lent is wilderness season: a season of wandering, a season marked by simplicity and fasting, of burying the alleluias, a season where it is tempting to ask, “Are we there yet?” as we make our way toward the promised land of Easter. But Lent isn’t a season we travel alone. Like the Hebrew people wandering the desert for forty years as a community, we spend forty days wandering through Lent with our communities of faith, our households and sometimes even friends across the globe.

This is why I decided to begin each day’s meditation with wisdom and inspiration from our monastic siblings. The Desert Mothers and Fathers, Saint Benedict, Saint Augustine, Saint Francis, Saint Hildegard, Sr. Joan Chittister and Thomas Merton were (and are) just ordinary humans traveling an ordinary human journey, together and alone. Their writings and biographies reflect the challenges of living a common life committed to Christ, anchored by spiritual practices such as stillness, silence, fasting, self-reflection, mutual listening and service. Practices are often thwarted or tested by the conflicts and pressures of living in community.

We all live in community. True, most of us don’t live in monasteries or desert communes, but we live in households and families; we are a part of churches, schools and workplaces. Following Jesus together and in the midst of each other is essential to becoming a beloved community, and it is often frustrating, which is why the words and teachings of the monastics are helpful. They remind us that we are not alone in our experiences; they give us words and tools to bring us together in a shared wholeness as we seek to spread the hope and healing of an Easter life.

For Reflection
Whose words or example encourages you as you strive to love as Jesus loves us?

We carry ourselves wherever we go.

Matrona 1, The Forgotten Desert Mothers by Laura Swan

The psalms had never been my favorite. For years, I found most of them repetitive, overly dramatic and a bit whiny. I found the ones attributed to David particularly annoying. After all, it seemed to me that David’s predicaments were often the natural consequences of his actions. I began to understand the psalms in a new way when I joined a discernment process to become an Oblate with the Community of Saint Mary’s Southern Province. An Oblate is a lay member of the Community who seeks to follow the Rule of Saint Benedict out in the world, an extension of the faithful practices of the monks and nuns.

Each day in this year of discernment, I read the psalms within Morning and Evening Prayer and reflected in writing on a portion of at least one psalm. After three hundred and sixty-some-odd days of this, I began to wonder if the point of the psalms wasn’t really about the ranting and the wailing, the anger or the begging. Perhaps the point was that God was with and present to the psalmists, even if they had brought their situation upon themselves.

Perhaps the revelation of the psalms is the same as that of Lent: God may not rescue us from the wilderness of our making, but God is always present to us. God is present to us in despair, anger, doubt, tears and repentance, no matter how long it takes us to get there. God is present to us when things are taking too long and when they are going too fast. God is present when we cause the trouble—and when the problem happens for no discernable reason. What if the thing we are meant to learn from the psalms and the practices of fasting, repenting and simplicity in Lent is that God, love divine, is always with us, in the pit, in the wilderness, in the fog and in the consequences?

For Reflection
People experience God’s presence differently. Some feel God’s presence as an emotion or physical sensation, and some hear or see God’s presence in nature, another person or a work of art. How do you experience God being present to you, especially in the wilderness? Do you experience it in the moment or upon reflection months or years later?

Reverence declares, “All of the things God established please me. I do not hurt any of them.

Hildegard of Bingen, Book of Life’s Merits

Last spring, we hosted a tree-planting day at our diocesan camp, and a sweet family with four little girls, all under the age of six, joined us for this endeavor. While not particularly interested in tree planting, one of the girls was quite invested in finding and rescuing worms. Each time she found a worm, she placed it with great reverence on a dandelion, one of thousands that month that colored the fields.

Here at camp, we like the dandelions because the bees like the dandelions. And we like the bees because we like the squash, tomatoes and apples that they pollinate—and of course, we love the honey they make for us as well. But deciding to have a campus that is polka-dotted with dandelions did not happen by accident. It is a choice that we continue to make as a sign of reverence, a sign of delight in what God has established.

Often, we think of God’s creation in terms of individual items or categories. We thank God for the tree, the rain and the apple seed. We work to save a river, a species or a person. We fight for a single cause. And yet, the total ecosystem that God has established requires our reverence: bees, dandelions, crooked-neck squash, honey and families are just a few members of the larger ecosystem. To care for any of these members, we must repent for our frequent neglect of the whole and remember that wherever we are, because God loves it, we are standing on holy ground.

For Reflection
Consider the ecosystem of a community in your life. What practices related to one member potentially damage the whole? What changes could positively affect the whole ecosystem?