© Congregation of the Sisters of Divine Providence
2023 Lent Letter
Lent 2023
Dear Sisters and Associates,
It hardly seems possible that Ash Wednesday and the season of Lent are upon us! As I begin this letter, I am looking out the window of my office here at the Generalate and at the landscape before me. I began to think about our inner landscape and ponder how we might ready our heart’s landscape for the invitations of grace that may come our way during this Lenten season.
God invites us to drop any defenses that we may hold up between ourselves and God. What might be the shackles around us, within us, keeping us from a free landscape? God offers an entire lifetime of loving us unconditionally, no matter what we have done or think we have hidden from God. The landscapes we live in shape us. The landscape of our community has shaped each one of us. In community we’ve each had transformative experiences…perhaps in the chapel, out for a walk, sitting in vigil beside a Sister’s bed as she makes the journey homeward to God…in our own prayer space. No doubt we have had moments of encountering the Holy One. That encounter shapes our dreams and desires and points us in a holy direction. Our mission and charism shape our response as well.
Our Provident God is loving, insistent, and gently prodding us to come, to listen, to open our heart’s landscape so that we may be embraced as God’s Beloved, for that is who we are. So what is necessary to ready the landscape? God asks for cooperation, acceptance, surrender. God invites us, listens to our questions, graces our responses, and awaits our free, loving, yes. God asks us to give our mind and heart to the human needs of all people. Our Provident God invites us to live lives deeply grounded in the life and teachings of Jesus, to let go of fear and uncertainty and to live in the freedom of a true daughter or son of Providence. But how often do we turn back? Can we keep our eyes fixed on Jesus and follow as He leads? Can we accept God’s grace that is essential to help make it possible to “not turn back?”
Jesus did not turn back; in fact, he readied his own landscape as his life unfolded. He was grounded in love. It called him to be authentic, to be true to his message and his witness of the immense compassion of God and the strength of God’s relationship with us. In the Scriptures we hear how Jesus emptied himself, humbled himself, became obedient, even to the point of death. He accepted death, which was really the result of all those untruths, judgments and fears. Yet Jesus remained faithful in love and truth. It’s difficult to imagine the level of trust Jesus had in his Father. But we can heed the lesson of Jesus’ trust, of his patient suffering for the sake of salvation, ours and others. Jesus calls us to follow him to the cross, and through the cross, as we journey to witness God’s power in Jesus and in us who believe.
We know how Jesus’ story ends. We have the gift of time and history to know it. We cannot yet know the end of the story of our faithfulness, our own authenticity, our own sharing in the suffering of Jesus and the saving of others. Time and history will tell that story long after we are gone. But Sisters and Associates, we can most assuredly trust the end of the story and hope in God’s Providential presence, mercy, compassion and salvation in each of our lives. For the sake of our wounded world, the suffering in Ukraine, the mass shootings, and in other landscapes across the globe, we must ready our landscape to be a healing presence wherever we are. The late Pope Benedict XVI said: “We are needed, we are willed, we are loved.” That is true for each of us! During this Lenten season, let us unshackle whatever might be binding us and keeping our landscape dry and barren. Let our Lenten landscape become lush and green and free.
May each of us find our true inner landscape and fall into the heart of God.
With love and blessings,
Sr. Barbara McMullen
Congregational Leader