This Sunday is known as Laetare Sunday. Laetare is a Latin word meaning “rejoice.” Why rejoice? We are close to celebrating the Easter mystery. Rose colored vestments symbolize joy.
The book of Joshua describes how the Hebrews crossed the Jordan River from the wilderness into the promised land. They celebrate the Passover and renew their promises of faithfulness to God. God in return will match their faithfulness with produce in abundance from this fertile land. The author may be challenging us to be grateful for God's manifold blessings and his unconditional love for us.
Paul, in his letter to the Christian community at Corinth in Greece, says we are new creatures, alive with the life of the triune God within us—Father, Son, and Spirit. This presence empowers us to become ambassadors for Jesus Christ, healers and peacemakers, and always generous or helpful in our families and workplaces and communities.
In the Gospel, Jesus gives us the parable of the prodigal son, and the forgiving parent. This parable has many levels of meaning. The younger son squandered his inheritance and then he “comes to his senses.” An amazing phrase! He realizes his true identity as a beloved son. He wants to be in relationship with his father, who unconditionally forgives and loves him and gives him a welcome-home party.
The older son finds this incomprehensible. But from a divine point of view, the story emphasizes God’s unconditional love for us. God’s love for us is as crazy as the love of the parent for the younger son.
The parable may move us to ponder forgiving someone who has wronged us. Some people become so fixated that they let wrongs done to them imprison them, so to speak. This parable challenges us to forgive. If we can’t forgive on our own, pray for the grace to participate in the forgiveness of Jesus, who pardons those who are truly sorry and try to become their better selves, with God’s grace.
The parable also invites us to see ourselves in these characters. Are we the forgiving parent? The repentant younger son? Or the resentful one?
Thomas Merten reminds me of the repentant younger son. Merten was one of the great 20th century spiritual writers. At Cambridge University, he engaged in reckless drinking and carousing. Then at Columbia, he delighted classmates with his wit and charm.
Merton's chance encounter with a classic book about the Christian understanding of God changed his life. That book was Gilson’s The Spirit of Medieval Philosophy. He then went with a friend, Robert Lax, to St. Bonaventure University, a Franciscan sponsored school in upstate New York, where he became instructor of English. He eventually applied to join the Franciscan friars but was rejected. But a friend advised Merton about the Trappist monks and off he went to Kentucky. He was based in Gethsemene[1] for the remaining twenty-seven years of his life.
Merton wrote dozens of books, poems and articles, and corresponded with religious thinkers and cultural icons, political movers and shakers and people of different faiths or no faith. All of us, Merton argued, are children of God.
Faithful to his Catholic tradition, and open to the truth in other religious traditions, Merton tried to live a life of prayer, of intimacy with God: through chanting the psalms, daily Eucharist and such practices as the stations of the cross and the rosary. Above all, he sought solitude and contemplation: that inner center within himself where he could feel God's love sustaining him.
In his book Seeds of Contemplation, Merton noted that noise, more than anything else, sabotages and blocks out the voice of God within us. Merton asked for the grace to clear his mind of earthly “concerns” so that in solitude he could move beyond thoughts and words into a felt awareness of the presence of God within himself. There he would sit still and listen to God's voice.
Merton sensed the presence of God all about him, in all creatures and all creation. All were holy. The invisible light of God in all creatures simply had to be made visible.
Our Lenten task, Merton might say, is to let the image of God become manifest in who we are, so that beyond appearances the very likeness of God may be seen in our attitudes and behaviors.
