A Daily Lent

Happiness Rises Saturday of the Third Week of Lent – March 21, 2020 I don’t want to undersell the difficulty and challenge in de Mello’s words this week. The work he describes with attachments is some of the most rigorous interior work we can undertake. At the same time, we experience a growing sense of interior freedom when we engage this spiritual work. There is a lightness of being that comes from not being weighed down by those people and things we cling to. And we have the experience, Fr Anthony describes, of “happiness rising.” Happiness arises between persons who are meeting without the desire to control, manipulate, or impress one another . . . happiness arises when we hear a beautiful piece of music . . . happiness arises when we participate in an act of kindness that makes a difference in the world . . . happiness arises when we see an object of beauty and stand still just to take the moment into ourselves. I love de Mello’s phrase. Happiness rising does not sugges...

Hearing the Whole Orchestra Thursday of the Third Week of Lent – March 19, 2020 Every human being sees the world in terms of how they have been programmed to experience their world. This is a long process. We’ve been at this our entire lives. No one wakes up this morning with a world-view that comes from nowhere. Developmentally, we each arrive at where we are today through the process of learning to attend to certain things and block out others. That means my dispositions and prejudices have been conditioned within me. I have been rewarded for some, and thus have held onto them. I have been punished or ostracized for others. Unless I am a strong person, I likely will let those go. Spiritually speaking, the nature of attachments is that we learn over time to give out-sized attention to some things, primarily because we view them as essential to our happiness. And we ignore other things because they don’t seem to “make my life better.” Attachments are not wrong ( right or...

Attachment Is Blind Sunday of the Third Week of Lent – March 15, 2020 Whenever I teach on the spiritual life and the word “attachment” comes up, almost immediately a panic flies over the room. The tension becomes palpable. Smiling faces turn into frowns. People begin to squirm, restless in their chairs. Sometimes a person will even say something like, “I knew I would have to give up something I like!” Spiritually speaking, attachments are those things to which we cling, expecting that they will give us life. They almost never do, especially as – or maybe because – we clutch them for dear life. Most things we hold onto don’t have the power to give life to us. They are finite people and temporal things. It’s not within their power to grant life; but we’re slow learners and though experience has taught us better, we still are hesitant to give up what we hold. The language of the Hebrew Scriptures for attachments was “idolatry.” Idols were those things that became gods. In our da...