This week in
Madonna House was anything but uneventful—indeed, it will be a challenge for me
to remember everything about it. For the first thing, I have been mentioning
regularly in this column that we have had a dearth of guests with us since
after Christmas. Well, forget about that—the dorms are filling up with a mix of
short and long term guests. I’m not sure if people consciously think ‘What will
I do for Lent? Oh, I know – I’ll go to MH!’ But that is in fact the normal
pattern each year… and it is indeed a pretty good place to spend part if not all of
Lent.
Last weekend
was our MH version of Mardi Gras, which happened to coincide with the
celebration of Harlem Foundation Day—the second phase of our apostolate when
Catherine pioneered in the civil rights movement in the States. So we had
lovely displays of all that, and a simple presentation of her work in that
field.
That very
day, though, we went in the pre-Lenten festivity mode. A home-made pizza supper
brought delight to our palates, and then a home-made variety hour, with a
strong element of comedy, brought delight to the rest of us. This is our annual
‘Pre-Lent Event’, which inevitably and invariably gets referred to colloquially
if somewhat irreverently as the ‘Ash Bash’.
I missed it
this year, being away at that vocation fair I mentioned last week, but people
appreciated in particularly a certain priest of ours of Irish extraction,
advanced in years but young in spirit, who lip-synched with high drama and
panache to the three tenors recording of the Irish folk ballad Purple Heather (that’s the one with the
‘will ye go, lassy go?’ bit). This is always a great evening of fun and family,
homemade entertainment for a community known for making everything by hand,
anyway.
The
traditional pancake supper on Tuesday ended our pre-Lenten blowout, and so we
all gathered bright and early on Ash Wednesday for Mass and ashes. We don’t
exactly do much communally in Lent that is different from the rest of the
year—there is far too much variance in age, health, physical activity,
spiritual maturity to have a communal program of fasting or penance.
We do have
as our Lauds hymn each morning the great Byzantine hymn Open to Me the Doors of Repentance, which lays out in graphic
strong language our profound sense of sin, and more profound sense of God’s
mercy. And Lauds each morning ends with the Prayer of St. Ephrem the Syrian,
about which I may blog this Lent at some point. Particularly salient in that
prayer is the call to ‘be aware of my sins and not judge my brother.’
For spiritual
reading we are doing one of our standbys – Great
Lent by Alexander Schmemann, which has some of the best teachings on the
fundamental Lenten attitudes and practices that I have ever encountered. His
chapter on fasting is alone worth the price of the book.
Meanwhile,
while Lent feels like an interminable season of 40 weeks, not days, it is in
fact short enough, and so the Easter preparations have already begun. The
Easter sweet bread koolitch, and the
special Easter confection paska, both
given to us by our Russian foundress, are being made, pysanky is being done in every corner of the house (that’s the
elaborately dyed Ukrainian Easter eggs), the paschal candle is being carved and
painted (yes, we make our own here).
All of which
is happening as winter continues to bite deep. We haven’t had the huge
snowfalls that Eastern Canada and the US have had, but we sure have had the
severe cold. One of our favourite hymns here is ‘The Lenten Spring has come’ –
it’s been hard not to sing it a bit ironically so far, as the wind howls and the
mercury plunges low each night.
And of
course all this is happening while cold winds and stormy weather beset our
world in other ways too—we are conscious in this Lenten season of the great
battle of good and evil, dark and light that marks our times. We believe our
little lives here—pizza and frolic, repentance and prayer, ora et labora, are the best response we can make to hatred and violence,
and we unite with all of you in praying for the world and offering our lives
for the healing of the nations, in and with Jesus Christ who made that offering
for all of us.
And that’s
what happened in MH this week.
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