I was fascinated by a recent essay I read by Jeannine Gramick. I did not know who she was until recently when I realized she has been getting quite a bit of publicity because Pope Francis wrote to congratulate her on fifty years work with the LBGTQ community. Obviously, our society’s discussion of that issue has changed remarkably over the years. As one who is older too, it is easy to recall how differently people talked about sexuality in earlier decades.
It does not really matter that Gramick is a nun, except for her to be doing this work within the Catholic context made her own life tricky and, at times, miserable. She was told not to do that work, so basically she was estranged from her own church community. Because she felt like God was calling her to it, she felt she could not do otherwise. While I am interested in all that, I was more intrigued by her words which grew out of her early experience of being a Catholic girl and then joining a religious community. The words that intrigued me had to do with Jesus and the desert and how those twin themes informed her understanding of Lent.
She begins her essay in a winsome way. “I remember giving up chocolates (which I still love) for Lent when I was a child, and making other sacrifices like fasting and rising early for daily Mass.” It is easy for me to contrast this with my own Quaker upbringing. I never heard of Lent and, therefore, never gave up anything for spiritual reasons. Having said that, it does not mean there were not rules---explicit and implied. Of course, I was not to smoke---or to give it up if I had started smoking. It was not a Lenten thing; it was because Jesus never smoked and wouldn’t like people who do! Unlike Gramick, there were no nuns in my life.
There were nuns in her life from early on. It was the nuns who “explained that these practices made us strong. They bolstered our self-control (one of the behavioral marks on our quarterly report cards). I was always a "good girl…” I tried always to be a “good boy.” As Gramick experienced and I knew as well, Vatican II changed things in the 1960s and since. The Roman Catholic Church breathed easier. There was more room. In fact, there was even room for people like me to be involved with Catholics in what were novel ways.
For someone like Gramick, she had some freedom. For example, she wondered about Lenten traditions. “I grew skeptical about "making sacrifices" because I was discovering too many sacrifices that came uninvited. Why, I wondered, should we take on self-imposed hardships when so many disadvantages were dumped on us already?” In effect, she wonders why give up something like chocolate when life delivers its own fair share of hardships? It is a valid question.
But then she tricked me. She went backwards to go forward. She confesses, “But now that I'm one of the ‘golden girls,’ I realize that my childhood training paid off. The nuns schooled me to live with a traditional Lenten theme: a time with Jesus in the wilderness.” I thought we had entered the realm of freedom and she goes back to traditional Lent. Now that I am relatively well educated, I know how Lent ties into the story of Jesus in the wilderness for forty days. For Jesus it was a time of preparation for his impending ministry---literally a ministry that changed the world. Was Gramick suggesting Lent can be the same kind of preparation for us?
To read the story about Jesus in the desert is a quaint kind of thing. Of course, he is tempted, but after all, he is Jesus. No big deal, right? I realized how easily I can read that story as if it is only the story of Jesus. Of course, it’s what he had to do in order to get ready to go be the Messiah. That is definitely not my calling. However, Gramik reframes it for me. She suggests, “The desert is the archetypal place of confronting ourselves, a place where we analyze our motives, question our behavior, investigate our future and find meaning in any suffering we may have experienced.” I understand desert as archetype. It is that for everyone. Everyone has already or go to the desert, which means we will confront ourselves.
Having said that, I also know how much I want to avoid confronting myself. I know our culture does not do that easily or well. We avoid or deny what we might find out. Gramick wants us to go there willingly---every Lent and even other times during the year, if needed. Suffering and trauma take us to the desert, even if we did not want to go. It is in the desert that we are given the chance to analyze ourselves and explore potential futures. The desert is where the meaning in life can be discovered or created.
Gramick is correct when she says, “In the desert there are no roads or maps, just the time and space to know God and ourselves in a clearer way.” I appreciate how she puts it here---there are no roadmaps. The desert is the place—and space---where we can take the time and make the effort to analyze ourselves. It is the place where we can come clean and decide who we want to be and explore who does God want me to be. I think this is my calling.
Gramick shared one more line which jumped out at me, although it was not her punchline. She observed, “Every Lent does end in an Easter, however, whether it comes in 40 days or 40 or more years.” That is good news. The desert is the means; the end is Easter…and maybe the beginning, too!
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