Giving and Forgiving

It's Lent, the season of preparation for Easter. For many Catholics, it means giving up something special or trying to do something extra to bring our faith more in focus during the 40 days before Easter.

I decided to give up coffee, an indulgence in my day - and relatively easy to do - and spend extra time in reflection and prayer - not so easy for me to do. Even as the number of students and new requests for assistance that come to my office are fewer, I still find my time occupied with many things and my mind preoccupied.

I've been following a blog of a former campus minister, John Donaghy, that's been helpful for me this Lent: Walk the Way and there are two reflections I'd like to share. The first was from a week or so ago:

Do not condemn,
and you will not be condemned.
Luke 6: 36-38

It is so easy to condemn others and to demonize whose who oppose us. But the message of Christ is different. As the Russian novelist Aleksander Solzhenitsyn wrote in his classic novel, The Gulag Archipelago:

If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of their own heart? During the life of any heart this line keeps changing place; sometimes it is squeezed one way by exuberant evil and sometimes it shifts to allow enough space for good to flourish. One and the same human being is, at various ages, under various circumstances, a totally different human being.

These words have been helpful in the daily struggles to do what's right and to try to interrupt life around me. Yesterday's reflection he shared from Henri Nouwen:

Do I truly want to be so totally forgiven that a completely new way of living becomes possible?… Do I want to break away from my deep-rooted rebellion against God and surrender myself so absolutely to God’s love that a new person can emerge. Receiving forgiveness requires a total willingness to let God be God and do all the healing, restoring , and renewing.

Henri Nouwen, The Return of the Prodigal Son

Tomorrow I am to give a short presentation on Lent to my small Christian Community (called Jumuiya in Swahili) that meets each week. I realized today that I'm going to talk about giving and forgiving, knowing well how I need to forgive myself for not being or doing all that I'd hoped and ask God to make something new.

A couple photos from March...

John O'Donoghue is a Maryknoll Lay Missioner who has just transferred from East Timor and came for a visit in Mombasa last weekend. He arrived just in time for the local St. Patrick's Day party and one of his many Mombasa adventures was meeting with the Amkeni (Wake up) Support group for people living with HIV.

After talking to them about their lives and aspirations, they gave him a clap. Here claps can be very organized and fun. Usually there's someone that leads the clap and starts with demonstrating which clap they will be leading. John was given the big soda clap, where the 2-L bottle lid is twisted and twisted and twisted until finally it pops open with a BIG CLAP!

And one of my Irish friends at the St Patrick's Day party, Fr Peter. He and I went to an amazing concert under the stars the week before - it had a local Italian restaurant owner that sang to move mountains and hearts, a Kenyan opera singer and another performer who played the soprano sax.

Happy Lent everyone!