Spiritual Quote of the Day (The Prophet Joel, With a Thought for Lent)

“ ‘Yet even now,” says the Lord,
    “return to me with all your heart,
with fasting, with weeping, and with mourning;
     and rend your hearts and not your garments.’
Return to the Lord, your God,
    for he is gracious and merciful,
slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love,
    and repents of evil.”—Joel 2:12-13
 
The image of Joel accompanying this post is a detail from the Sistine Chapel in the Vatican, by the Italian Renaissance artist Michelangelo Buonarroti (1475-1564).

Spiritual Quote of the Day (Christina Rossetti, on Hope Awakening in Mid-Lent)

“At night wake hope. Poor soul, in such sore need
Of wakening and of girding up anew,
Hast thou that hope which fainting doth pursue?
No saint but hath pursued and hath been faint;
Bid love wake hope, for both thy steps shall speed,
Still faint yet still pursuing, O thou saint.”— English poet Christina Rossetti (1830-1894), “Mid-Lent,” originally published in Verses (1893), republished in The Complete Poems, edited by R.W. Crump (2001)

Spiritual Quote of the Day (St. John Climacus, on Repentance, ‘The Daughter of Hope’)

“Repentance is the renewal of baptism. Repentance is a contract with God for a second life. A penitent is a buyer of humility. Repentance is constant distrust of bodily comfort. Repentance is self condemning reflection, and carefree self-care. Repentance is the daughter of hope and the renunciation of despair. A penitent is an undisgraced convict. Repentance is reconciliation with the Lord by the practice of good deeds contrary to the sins. Repentance is purification of conscience.”— Christian monk St. John Climacus (?-649 AD), The Ladder of Divine Ascent (ca. 600 AD), translated by Archimandrite Lazarus Moore (1959)

The image accompanying this post, The Return of the Prodigal Son, was created by Dutch Golden Age painter Rembrandt (1606-1669) from 1661 to 1668. That parable is one of the greatest biblical stories of repentance, and a useful one to keep in mind in this Lenten season.

Rembrandt's painting is one of the finest of his career. Interestingly, we never see the face of the prodigal, but of the forgiving father--and, off to the side, the son who never went away and is glowering now with resentment over his parent's perceived favoritism.

Spiritual Quote of the Day (Dorothy Day, on Working for ‘Joy and Peace in a Harried World’)

“What we would like to do is change the world—make it a little simpler for people to feed, clothe, and shelter themselves as God intended them to do. And, by fighting for better conditions, by crying out unceasingly for the rights of the workers, the poor, of the destitute—the rights of the worthy and the unworthy poor, in other words—we can, to a certain extent, change the world; we can work for the oasis, the little cell of joy and peace in a harried world. We can throw our pebble in the pond and be confident that its ever-widening circle will reach around the world. We repeat, there is nothing we can do but love, and, dear God, please enlarge our hearts to love each other, to love our neighbor, to love our enemy as our friend.” ― American journalist, social activist, and Catholic convert Dorothy Day (1897-1980), The Catholic Worker, 1946

Spiritual Quote of the Day (St. Pope John Paul II, on Lent)

“Lent is a time that makes us think about our relationship with ‘Our Father’; it re-establishes the order that should reign between brothers and sisters. Lent is a time that makes us jointly responsible for one another; it detaches us from our selfishness, small-mindedness, meanness and pride; it is a time that enlightens us and makes us understand better that we too, like Christ, must serve.” —St. Pope John Paul II (1920-2005), Message for Lent 1981

Quote of the Day (St. Augustine, on ‘Forgiveness From the Heart’)

“There are many kinds of alms, by which, when we do them, we are helped in obtaining forgiveness of our own sins. But none of these alms is greater than the forgiveness from the heart of a sin committed against us by someone else.”—St. Augustine of Hippo (354-430 AD), The Enchiridion: Being a Treatise on Faith, Hope and Love, translated by Professor J. F. Shaw (1883)

Quote of the Day (St. John Chrysostom, on Fasting and Good Works)

“The value of fasting consists not in abstinence from food, but in withdrawing from sinful practices; since he who limits his fasting only to an abstinence from meats, is one who especially disparages it. Do you fast? Give me proof of it by your works! Is it said by what kind of works? If you see a poor man, take pity on him! If you see an enemy, be reconciled to him! If you see a friend gaining honour, envy him not! If you see a handsome woman, pass her by! For let not the mouth only fast, but also the eye, and the ear, and the feet, and the hands, and all the members of our bodies.”— St. John Chrysostom (c. 349 – 407), Homily 3, On the Statues

Quote of the Day (James Agee, on the Appeal of Lenten Hymns)

“The leaden melodies of the Lenten hymns had appealed to him as never before; lines in certain hymns seemed, during that time, to have been written especially for him. Jesus, I my Cross have taken, he would sing, already anticipating the lonely solace of tears concealed in public: all to leave and follow Thee; destitute, despis’d, forsaken, were words especially dear to him; Thou from hence my All shall be….he saw crowned God and Heaven shining and felt, in a humble kind of way, that he literally owned them.”—James Agee, The Morning Watch (1951)

Quote of the Day (C. S. Lewis, on Lent’s Call to Repentance)

“Laying down your arms, surrendering, saying you are sorry, realizing that you have been on the wrong track and getting ready to start life over again from the ground floor - that is the only way out of a ‘hole.’  This process of surrender - this movement full speed astern - is what Christians call repentance.  Now repentance is no fun at all.  It is something much harder than merely eating humble pie.  It means unlearning all the self-conceit and self-will that we have been training ourselves into for thousands of years.  It means undergoing a kind of death.  In fact, it needs a good man to repent.  And here's the catch. Only a bad person needs to repent: only a good person can repent perfectly.  The worse you are the more you need it and the less you can do it.  The only person who could do it perfectly would be a perfect person - and he would not need it.”—C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (1952)

Quote of the Day (John Paul II, on the ‘Vineyard of Christian Charity’)

“The vineyard of Christian Charity is short of workers; the Church is calling you to it. Do not wait until it is too late to help Christ in prison or without clothing, Christ persecuted or a refugee, Christ who is hungry or without a roof. Help our brothers and sisters who lack the bare necessities to escape from inhuman conditions and to reach true human advancement.”—Pope John Paul II, Lenten Message 1979

Song Lyric of the Day (“Day by Day,” on What to Pray For)

“Oh Dear Lord

Three things I pray

To see thee more clearly

Love thee more dearly

Follow thee more nearly

Day by day.”—“Day by Day,” from the Godspell soundtrack (1971), music and lyrics by Stephen Schwartz

Several weeks ago, driving in my car, I heard “Day by Day” for the first time in what seemed like decades, and suddenly I wasn’t traveling to a place but to a point in time—the early Seventies, with all the requisite bell bottoms, long hair, wide sideburns, love beads, and debates about how to make the message of the Gospel relevant to youth.

Listening to the song, I was struck, in a way I hadn’t been four decades ago, by “Day by Day”'s repetitiousness. There's not much beyond the refrain. But it didn’t matter. It moved something deep inside, like a stream surging beneath a frozen surface.

I still haven’t seen the stage or film versions of the musical of which this wildly joyful song forms only a part, Godspell. But in the early Seventies, when the tune became a hit, I swear that I heard it everywhere I turned—and each time, it lifted my heart.

Both of my brothers, a few years older than myself, must have heard it even more than I did. Theirs was the time when the Catholic coffeehouse culture really came into their own, complete with youth outreach by priests and guitar-driven folk masses. I’m sure somebody must have picked up a guitar at one of these settings and started to harmonize on this song.

Stephen Schwartz’s musical arrived on the scene within the same year as Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice’s Jesus Christ Superstar. Though there were some angry murmurs about the clown makeup and other cultural accouterments employed to retell incidents in the Gospel according to St. Matthew, Schwartz’s creation never excited the controversy that JCS did.

Part of it might have had something to do with the message of songs like “Day by Day.” After all, aren’t the “three things I pray” at the heart of the Lenten journey so many of us take?

Quote of the Day (A Fordham Co-Ed, on “Facebook Fasting”)

“I went to church, and I thought what would actually bring me closer to God or give me a better sense of self? What takes up time in my day? Facebook.”—Rebecca, a Fordham University student, discussing why she gave up her five-to-10 hours per week surfing Facebook, quoted in Marlene Naanes, “Saving ‘Face’ With God: Catholics Give Up Networking Site for Lent,” AM New York, March 10, 2009

Dear Rebecca,

If, by the magic of the Internet, you or one of your friends comes across this post, I hope you’ll reconsider your decision. It might be one thing if a friend was urging you to do so.

But this plea might have more credibility coming from someone like myself, a middle-aged technophobe who, unlike you, still hasn’t mastered all the nuts and bolts of Facebook over the course of a few weeks: Sacrificing Facebook is not the best way to get closer to God.

To start with, despite everything you may have heard in elementary and high school, perhaps even college, Lent is less about sacrificing things in your life than about rededicating yourself to God. If it means closing out the distractions in your life—to go, as “Desiderata” says, “placidly amid the noise and haste of this world”—fine. But otherwise, boiled down to its most absurd extreme, Lent becomes a mere 40-day dieting program instead of the searching reexamination of our lives that it should be.

Even giving up Facebook, I think, would be counterproductive. I write this as someone who, though appalled at its lowering of traditional privacy barriers, believes strongly in its power to bring people together. Even the pope has hailed that and other social networks for “forging friendships and understanding,” though he warns that it can’t replace real social interaction.

Facebook’s unparalleled power to communicate and draw people together can be a powerful tool to help you and other Catholic students, at Fordham and elsewhere, do something meaningful for God during Lent.

Sure, some people have been known to report on the most idle doings of their day while online—and to engage just about everyone they know in the most time-wasting chatter. But how about putting Facebook to better uses?

Why not create, if you haven’t done so already, online communities for dealing with the most pressing problems that face and their communities today? Here is just a partial inventory of voluntary work crying to be done, and readers are invited to add to the list:

* Helping the elderly—men and women often suddenly and catastrophically hit with health problems, and frequently suffering from loneliness and depression—in hospitals, elder-care facilities or their own homes;

* Work at a foodbank or homeless shelter to aid those without food or a home;

* Volunteer at libraries—institutions used now more than ever by people looking for jobs or simply wanting entertainment they can obtain for free, but institutions also among the first to be targeted for draconian budget cuts;

* Join organizations for helping victims of emergencies (e.g., the “Seeds for Haiti” program, designed to get bean and corn seeds for Haitian farmers devastated by hurricanes, tropical storms and other weather-related disasters)

The list can go on and on. The point is to draw people together so they can connect—and act. Facebook can be an essential part of this process.