Our reflection question for this week of our Grief and Grace Lenten retreat is: What are you grieving?
Fr. Alex Steinmiller, C.P., the founder of Life Directions and a member of the Passionist Community in Detroit, Michigan, shares his experience.
Daily Scripture, March 9, 2025
First Sunday of Lent
Scripture:
Deuteronomy 26:4-10
Romans 10:8-13
Luke 4:1-13
Reflection:
Our Desert Journey Begins
Our first Sunday of Lent always brings us to the desert where Jesus is tempted. On Ash Wednesday our foreheads were marked, ‘Remember man that you are dust and unto dust you shall return’, sobering words spoken to Adam by God as he exits the garden. But no more can we wash the meaning of the ashes from our forehead than can we forget that the dirt to which we shall return is so beautifully molded by God, delightfully fashioned into our individuality and uniqueness. We are God’s treasure. The artist of Chartres cathedral who fashioned the image of Adam sleeping in God’s arms tells us this without using words. He reminds us of the promise of God’s love for each of us, a love rich in fidelity and abounding in kindness. His carving says that it is after the fall when God leaves the garden to check on his children; God picks up Adam, God picks up Eve, and He hugs them and loves them as they sleep.
We are in the desert with Jesus. Like the ashes it also has a beautiful symbol full of hidden hope and love. Deuteronomy shows both sides of the desert: Abraham is a wandering man in a foreign land, an alien, but God surprises him with descendants like the sand of the seashore and the stars of the sky. He becomes a nation! Egypt became a place of suffering, a desert for Israel, but God led them out and they passed over from death to new life! Miriam with her tambourine led Israel in a dance, ‘Let us sing to the Lord; he has covered himself in glory’. And in the long Exodus journey to the promised land, a desert journey, there awaits a land flowing with milk and honey.
The desert is fertile.
None of us could see the ashes that were placed upon our foreheads, could we? We could see our neighbors, our family, the strangers we passed on Wednesday. Paul says today there is no distinction between Jew or Greek, indeed, no distinction between any of us at all, ‘man, woman you are dust and to dust you shall return’. God’s creative and saving love is for all, our ashes are not only for ourselves, we share them together.
We have gone into the desert to begin our journey and to passover with Our Lord from death to the life of the Risen One, the one who will be the First Born from among the dead. The desert will become a place transformed, the closed gate to the Beautiful Garden will be opened, a place perhaps to pause and stare as our journey led by the Good Shepherd continues on to its end at the banquet table in our Father’s house?
Be attentive on the Lenten journey that Our God is a God of consolation. Love does not disappear, hope is always with us, the desert brings forth life. The tempter of our human nature who even uses truth to bad purpose as we hear in the gospel, deals in desolation, making hope and love seem out of reach. Speak to Jesus on the journey through our desert these days. Humbly ask the one tempted in the desert for protection from desolation in our deserts. Let us break out the tambourine on occasion, let us laugh with Sarah and the holy ones who have gone before us and those who surround us. Let us help each other to know God’s consolation in our midst, even in the desert.
Fr. William Murphy, CP, is a member of Immaculate Conception Community in Jamaica, New York.
Saturday After Ash Wednesday
Daily Scripture, March 8, 2025
Scripture:
Reflection
The Lenten message is simple, but easily missed and almost always quickly forgotten: If we do good things—if we especially seek justice for the poor and afflicted—we will be renewed. If we stop dancing with evil, we will find happiness and life.
In the first reading from Isaiah, the prophet tells Israel that if it wants the light to shatter the darkness and joy to scatter sadness, they must confront the evil surrounding them. They must replace injustice with justice. “If you remove from your midst oppression, false accusation and malicious speech; If you bestow your bread on the hungry and satisfy the afflicted,” Isaiah promises, “Then light shall rise for you in the darkness, and the gloom shall become for you like midday….” That’s all they have to do to be brought from death back to life. But Isaiah’s words are meant for us as well. If we battle oppression wherever we find it; if we stop all malicious speech; if we share what we have with the needy and reach out to the afflicted and broken ones we see everyday, then light and life will come to us.
In today’s gospel story from Luke, the Lenten message comes to us as an invitation. Jesus sees Levi, a tax collector, and extends to him the unnerving invitation to leave everything behind for the sake of an uncharted future. Jesus calls him to strike out on a new path, a different way of being, and Levi does. In a burst of pure freedom, Levi redefines himself from tax collector to disciple. The gospel suggests if Levi is to find hope and new life, he has to reimagine not just his life, but even his identity. He has to think of himself as an initiate on a new adventure, a disciple on a path to a different but richly promising way of life.
If Lent is all about being healed and renewed, perhaps it begins in the gospel’s call to reimagine who we are and what we are up to.
Paul J. Wadell is Professor Emeritus of Theology & Religious Studies at St. Norbert College in De Pere, Wisconsin, and a member of the Passionist Family.
Friday After Ash Wednesday
Daily Scripture, March 7, 2025
Scripture:
Reflection:
Whoever loves father or mother more than me is not worthy of me,
and whoever loves son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me;
and whoever does not take up his cross
and follow after me is not worthy of me.
Whoever finds his life will lose it,
and whoever loses his life for my sake will find it. -Matthew 10:37-39
Me, me, me! Who is the “me” in the passage from our Gospel reading today, and what is this cross that he challenges me with today? The easy answer is Jesus and his cross on Calvary. The not-so-easy answer is what Jesus is trying to tell me today, March 7, 2025.
I was a 24-year-old student-teacher in an inner city Chicago Public School. The year was 1968. Martin Luther King was assassinated in April, and this was the following September. This was not the world where I grew up. This school did not resemble any school I had attended in all my 18 years of attending school. This was a school where I never met the principal. He never came out of his office. A school where, as a student teacher, I could not go into the cafeteria because of all the plates being thrown in fights among the students. This was a school where I hardly remember a class that didn’t involve leaving the classroom with thirty students, usually going down three or four flights of stairs because someone had pulled the fire alarm and then returning after an all-clear with less than half the class I started with. A school where many of the students in my assigned classes couldn’t read or understand English—a school where my car, albeit a real junker, was stolen twice.
This experience led me to leave teaching and search for a different career. I did find one that sidetracked me for the next year and a half, but I eventually ended up back facing that strange world of the inner-city school of the ’70s. I also found the me that was afraid of people who experienced life differently.
I believe this Jesus is a person who is comfortable with people who come from very different backgrounds. He doesn’t run from the stranger or the strange world from which they come. He embraces them and this embrace is the cross that leads to resurrection. It is the cross of openness to the other, and the willingness to travel together this road of new life. God, help me take up my cross that you gift me with today and hope in the new life you promise.
Dan O’Donnell is a Passionist Partner and a longtime friend of the Passionists. He lives in Chicago, Illinois.
Thursday After Ash Wednesday
In a challenging podcast conversation with Kyle Kramer, Executive Director of the Passionist Earth and Spirit Center, Stephen Jenkinson reflects on the deep roots of our troubled times and on how rich and full human belonging – in one’s life, one’s culture, one’s place – means letting go of our drive for autonomy to embrace the beauty of our limits.
Click here to listen to the podcast.
Daily Scripture, March 6, 2025
Scripture:
Deuteronomy 30:15-20
Luke 9:22-25
Reflection:
As 2025 began, fires in Southern California devastated thousands of communities. Homes, schools, community centers, businesses small and large, museums, and historic buildings were burnt to a crisp in minutes. The Passionist Retreat Center near Los Angeles suffered heavy damage. Regardless of how the fires were sparked, the bone-dry conditions met demonic wind gusts to spread the devastation so fast that people rushed to save their lives in minutes. Many were unable to escape and succumbed to the unleashed forces of nature.
Weeks later, in my home state of Kentucky, extreme weather took the lives of 23. Two of the victims were unhoused and froze to death on the street. In the Eastern Kentucky mountains, corporate interests have battered the land for decades by mountaintop removal coal mining and clear-cutting to harvest every tree. The stage was set for rainwater to rush from hillsides into valleys in seconds, wiping out homes and businesses. First responders and ordinary citizens scrambled to rescue the vulnerable from their little homes. Witness young men walking in waist-deep water carrying a feeble, traumatized woman to safety.
As the year continues, we can anticipate more climatic disasters. Droughts, excessive heat, tornadoes, hurricanes, wildfires, food shortages, and more flooding.
For years scientists and Pope Francis have foretold these apocalyptic events. Government policy makers, corporate leaders, and the majority of ordinary citizens ignored them. Nations have done and are doing too little to curb global warming, as the Pope reiterated in another recent warning. The future looks bleak for Mother Earth.
Capitalism without proper guardrails kills people and destroys the delicate balance in our environment. Profits are too often more important than the common good. Individual liberties are not balanced with the welfare of human communities.
Moses, like the pope, set forth two options for his people: “. . . life and prosperity, death and doom. If you . . .turn away your hearts and will not listen, but are led astray and adore and serve other gods, I tell you now that you will certainly perish; you will not have a long life on the land that you are crossing the Jordan to enter and occupy. . . I have set before you life and death, the blessing and the curse. Choose life. . .”
These words are difficult to hear. The temptation is to minimize what we see, what we experience. Won’t it all solve itself? Isn’t this just an aberration, an out-of-the-norm event?
We want to remain indifferent, to find comfort in our portfolios, retirement accounts, and positive self-talk. It is easy to escape by pleasure travel, sports, socializing with like-minded people, and hiding out in our personal home entertainment centers in safe neighborhoods.
A critical self-examination of consciousness, done in quiet prayer and perhaps with a wise spiritual director, might awaken us to how God is drawing us to respond to this moment in human history.
Jesus’ words in today’s Gospel are among the most challenging in the New Testament: “For whoever wishes to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake will save it. What profit is there for one to gain the whole world yet lose or forfeit himself?”
Jesus desires that we be indifferent to our fears. He wants us to put absolute trust in Him by choosing life each day. This may mean questioning why we are hoarding so much money in a world where poverty is killing our sisters and brothers. It may mean stepping into the places where Christ is being crucified today . . . nursing homes, hospitals, poor neighborhoods, children’s homes, shelters for the unhoused, and soup lines. It may mean traveling less and turning down the thermostat in the winter to cut down on our fossil fuel consumption, switching to renewable energies, planting home gardens and trees, and advocating for government policies that protect the Earth instead of corporate interests.
This is the spirituality of our time as the pope outlined in the encyclical Laudato Si’ in 2015. If you haven’t read it, now, during Lent, might be a good time to get a copy and make the words your own.
Thus we can respond to Moses, “We choose life.”
Jim Wayne is a member of St Agnes Catholic Community in Louisville, Kentucky, a Passionist parish. He served in the Kentucky House of Representatives for 28 years, is the author of the award winning novel, The Unfinished Man, and is a clinical social worker.