Be of Strong Heart During Lent

A Letter from Bishop Nicholas DiMarzio

My dear brothers and sisters in the Lord,

Next Wednesday, Feb. 18, we begin the season of Lent, the time when we prepare ourselves to celebrate the Easter Mystery. It is a time of preparation which over the centuries has taken many different forms.

Bishop DiMarzio's Bio

In the Message for Lent that our Holy Father, Pope Francis, has issued this year, he has taken the theme: “Make your hearts firm.” (Jas 5:8) The season of Lent is the time when we are asked to firm up our faith, when we are to give special attention to training our will so that we can love God all the more. The phrase “make your hearts firm” has special meaning to me because five-and-a-half years ago I underwent quadruple bypass surgery. One of the wonderful gifts one receives following this surgery is a red heart-shaped pillow which is needed to hold tight to your chest whenever you cough since you do feel that you are coming apart. Quadruple bypass surgery entails breaking the sternum, commonly called the breastbone, for the surgery. It takes many months for that bone to heal and to this day I still feel the wires which were put in place to keep it together.

The pillow has a special meaning, as it is called the “Brave Heart Pillow.” Yes, your heart must be brave to undergo that type of operation. And so it is with Lent, we have that brave heart, for without brave hearts we will have wills that are weak and we will not be allowed to follow the will of God. As Pope Francis says in his Lenten Message, “As a way of overcoming indifference and our pretensions of self-sufficiency, I would invite you all to live this Lent as an opportunity for engaging in what Benedict XVI called a formation of the heart (cf. Deus Caritas Est, 31). A merciful heart does not mean a weak heart. Anyone who wishes to be merciful must have a strong and steadfast heart, closed to the tempter but open to God. A head which lets itself be pieced by the Spirit so as to bring love along the roads that lead to our brothers and sisters. And, ultimately, a poor heart, one which realizes its own poverty and gives itself freely for others.”

Many times we see Lent as a time of mortification and that is good. To mortify means to kill, killing or deadening our wills through a set of good practices such as fasting, doing good works and trying to rein in our disordered appetites which hinder the full integration of our human person and to freely respond to the Holy Spirit. Sometimes this entails doing the things we do not want to do, which is the greatest kind of mortification. St. Paul tells us, “So then, my brothers, we have no obligation to human nature to be dominated by it. If you do live in that way, you are doomed to die; but if by the Spirit you put to death the habits originating in the body, you will have life.” (Rm 8-13) How important it is that we acquire good habits. It is unfortunate that bad habits are much easier to acquire. To change our bad habits into good habits is something that we all can work on during Lent.

The Lenten tradition of 40-days of preparation has its roots in the Old Testament. In the Book of Deuteronomy, 9-18, we hear that Moses falls prostrate before Yahweh and spent 40 days and 40 nights with nothing to eat or drink on account of all the sins which the people of Israel had committed. They had broken His Covenant and Moses tried to restore the Covenant by his personal fasting.

In the First Book of Kings, we hear of the Prophet Elijah who on his journey to Horeb, where he was to encounter God, ate and drank to be strengthened for his walk of 40 days and 40 nights to reach Horeb. And so we see that fasting can be positive or negative in preparing us for the journey of Lent. We can abstain or we can do good works.

Perhaps our greatest example, however, is the Lord, Himself, who we hear on this First Sunday of Lent being tempted in all of the synoptic Gospels. We see that the temptations that the Lord undergoes all have something to do with our human nature, and all of the temptations come from the devil. We know that He is tempted by the devil to turn stones into bread, as we are to satisfy our basic human needs and natural desire for pleasure. We see how Jesus was tempted to jump into the pinnacle of the Temple with the promise that God would save Him, testing God’s providence in enhancing the human pride that comes from testing God. And finally, Jesus is tempted to bow down and worship the devil, to make a concession so that Jesus can have the whole world as His Kingdom. Through the course of our lifetime, we experience ourselves all of these temptations in some way.

And so, we return to the practices of Lent and the mortification which I mentioned previously. We must deaden the will to the wrong appetites, enabling us to be active in doing certain good works and passive in accepting the contradictions and the difficulties of our daily life.

At times, we need to mortify our interior senses. Sometimes our intelligence, or imagination, leaves us daydreaming and wasting time and not being able to get rid of a thought which leads us nowhere. Exteriorly, this is fasting which sometimes helps us to be more cognizant of our relationship to God and enables us to be more positive by giving up something and seeking God in our lives.

Mortification has been described as the drawbridge that enables us to enter into the castle of prayer, because prayer is the ultimate goal of mortification. We are not masochists as Christians, yet we know that without mortification we will not find the true happiness which is ours on Earth. Only the person who understands mortification, who can live simply and enjoys the good things of life, will understand how to accept the suffering that is part of every human life. Another spiritual author said that a day without mortification is a day lost because we have not united ourselves to God.

Finally, Jesus came to the cross having prepared Himself for 33 years. His disciples who are most intimate with Him, do not understand the mystery of the cross, not until the Resurrection.

And so it is with us, as we put out into the deep of Lent, we will not understand the meaning of our mortification, our suffering, our good works. Only at the time of the Resurrection, this Easter for us, will we understand the deeper meaning of why we have undergone this period of preparation that is so much part of our faith which at the same time enlivens and challenges our faith.

From the Tablet

Seeking God in the Silence

“Where shall the word be found, where will the word

Resound? Not here, there is not enough silence…”

∼ T.S. Eliot, Ash-Wednesday

One of the truly awful torments of modern life, from whose myriad aggressions no one is entirely safe, is noise. More and more, it fills the space that was once marked by that silence whose absence we seem increasingly not to notice. Nor even, it seems, to mind, so accustomed have we grown to ever higher and more intrusive levels of din. Indeed, so often are we in flight from silence, so quickly do we turn up the volume, that one might think the work of suppression part of a larger strategy to deflect the emptiness of our own lives. Thus the ambient noise allows us not to think, to leave unattended the whole inner life, which we might otherwise activate, were there only enough silence to encourage the exercise.


“We are no longer able to hear God,” warns Pope Benedict, “when there are too many different frequencies filling our ears.” Where the decibel levels are so screamingly shrill as to drive all the silence away, it is no surprise that his presence goes undetected. So where does one go to escape the din? And if such places actually exist, will it cost very much to stay? For how long? The writer Pico Iyer, author of a number of studies on the subject, tells us that he regularly disappears into the silence, sequestering himself every three or four months in a small monastic cell about a thousand feet above an ocean. Why does he do it? He goes, he tells us, “to become another self, the self that we all are if only we choose to unpack our overstuffed lives and leave our selves at home.”


It is obviously something very important to him, this entering into the silence. Where, effectively removed from the noise and the clutter of the daily round, he ventures with the utmost daring, “to lay claim to a mystery at the heart of me.” And I know just what he means, having myself spent a number of days in a comparable state of silence; I too found it wonderful and welcoming. Of course, unlike Mr. Pico, who finds himself seasonally ensconced in a monastery whose faith he does not share, I can’t imagine a setting both silent and yet without recourse to God. Except for the fact that Mr. Pico is free to come and go as he pleases, his situation strikes me as not much different from solitary confinement in a prison. The silence is undeniably there, all right, but it leads to a fixation on the self that seems, well, solipsistic.


So on what terms of incarceration do I spend my silent stretches? Well, the last time around, it was the result of an invitation to speak to a community of Cistercian monks, who had asked me to come and give a series of conferences on the spiritual life. Here are men who take the vocation of silence with utter seriousness. Their monastery, located high in the mountains outside Salt Lake City, had been founded in 1947 by a handful of Trappists from Gethsemani, Kentucky, determined on building a contemplative outpost in the heart of Mormon country. It was the aftermath of the Second World War, and among the GIs returning home, many having experienced firsthand the futility and horror of battle, there were some, a heroic few, who sought enlistment in a discipline more demanding even than the Marine Corps. It was holiness they were after. Unending intimacy with God. But it had to be pursued in a setting surrounded by, immersed in, silence. How else could they seek and find that Sounding Silence of which all the great mystics speak? There, amid the stillness, they would, in the words of T.S. Eliot, “be still and still moving / Into another intensity / For a further union, a deeper communion….”


And so it happened that a small contingent of resolute young men belonging to the Order of the Cistercians of the Strict Observance, headed west in search of God. Throwing up a couple of Quonset huts for themselves, they set about in the spirit of St. Bernard of Clairvaux, the order’s most celebrated member, to rediscover the joys of twelfth-century religious life.


So what was it like living among medievals in a world rendered blessedly mute save for the movement of the wind outside, the lovely lilt of music and prayer inside? It was as if time itself had stood still. Will heaven be like this? I wondered. In his moving encyclicalOn Christian Hope, Pope Benedict provides a glimpse—a sudden, luminous glint, as it were—of the joys that may await us on the other side of silence.


To imagine ourselves outside the temporality that imprisons us and in some way to sense that eternity is not an unending succession of days in the calendar, but something more like the supreme moment of satisfaction, in which totality embraces us and we embrace totality—this we can only attempt. It would be like plunging into the ocean of infinite love, a moment in which time—the before and after—no longer exists … such a moment is life in the full sense, a plunging ever anew into the vastness of being, in which we are simply overwhelmed with joy.


And while we do not as yet possess this life, we nevertheless feel ourselves drawn to it in the silence that beckons, soliciting us by its benign and gentle grasp to let go, “to put off” (again, the words of Eliot come to mind):


Sense and notion. You are not here to verify,
Instruct yourself, or inform curiosity
Or carry report. You are here to kneel
Where prayer has been valid. And prayer is more
Than an order of words, the conscious occupation
Of the praying mind, or the sound of the voice praying.


Can this happen without silence? Is it possible to acquire this repose of the soul, never mind how imperfect, unless there is silence? Certainly we long for it, and even in the midst of its noisy absence we feel ourselves drawn towards it; but without some conscious effort to create a space for it, nothing will happen. “A condition of complete simplicity,” is how Eliot describes it. And the cost, he asks? It can never be less than everything.


And all shall be well and
All manner of things shall be well
When the tongues of flame are in-folded
Into the crowned knot of fire
And the fire and the rose are one.


So, yes, it will take some getting used to, this business of finding time for silence. A lifetime at least. But the effort will be worth it, providing as it must the setting for that necessary and salutary cultivation of the soul on which the life of holiness depends. And what really is silence but a whole world in which the spirit is set free to commune, not simply with its own deepest self, but with God himself. He Who Is.


Which is pretty much what the twenty or so monks living in Utah have been about all these years. Of that original group that began sixty or more years ago, not many have survived, and those who have, along with a handful of others who signed on later, all looked pretty long in the tooth to me. The abbot, for example, a most agreeable young man in his early seventies, told me the average age was just over eighty. I’d have put the figure rather higher than that. (Between conferences, I will confess, I could never be quite sure if anyone would survive.) Still, it was the oldest ones, those closest to the end of their journeys, who impressed me most. I think of dear Brother Felix, for example, who, God willing, must be in his late nineties by now. What a lovely man he was! Bent and gnarled by age and illness, his sight virtually gone, I watched him day by day moving in a sort of rhythmic silence from station to station, in a Via Dolorossa that had become his life.


And what will the fate of the monastery be, if fresh recruits cannot be found? Will God supply the need? He surely did seven centuries ago when the charism of Cistercian life found concrete expression in over five-hundred abbey churches strewn about the countryside of Northern Europe by the year 1300. Another one-hundred-and-fifty arose in the following century. “It’s a matter for prayer,” the Abbot says, his voice bespeaking a confidence borne of his own intense life of prayer.


All things being possible with God, I’d put my money on the monks. After all, isn’t prayer the thing they do best? And inhabiting, as they feel themselves obliged to do, a whole world of silence, the perfect medium for the life of prayer could scarcely be improved upon. Yes, I do believe God will reward such faithfulness to prayer with renewed life and vocations.

by REGIS MARTIN