Learning our Lines and Taking a Bow
Written by John Osterholzer on Saturday after Ash Wednesday
This year’s Lenten blog asks us to look “outward” and contemplate our role among a unified cast of characters portraying Christ’s Passion. This challenge would have thoroughly unnerved me years ago as a college freshman. Well-intentioned but ego-centric, my faith could be simplified to: looking “upward” to God, “inward” to self, and “downward” to sin. Lent was spent considering my personal sinfulness, not the collective sins of my faith community.
My attitude towards Lent changed my first Ash Wednesday at St. Mary’s. Moving forward to receive ashes, the sheer numbers of parishioners processing with me penetrated my “Lenten bunker”. Together we forged a common bond further strengthened by the sight of our ash-marked foreheads around campus that afternoon. For the first time, I understood that Lent could be as deeply communal as it was personal.
Viewed through the prism of this year’s Lenten challenge, I recognize the innumerable individuals who served interchangeably as “co-cast members” and “spiritual directors” in the years since that first Ash Wednesday at St. Mary’s. Their wisdom, inspiration, and instruction helped (and still help) me embrace my role on the stage of life. I often feel as if I’m still “learning my lines”; yet I’ve come to accept that this is a normal, if not essential, part of God’s plan.
At Lent’s conclusion, we process forward as one community to wash each other’s feet and venerate the cross. Through our readings on Palm Sunday and Good Friday, we reenact the last days of Jesus’ life and recognize our individual and collective acts of betrayal, cruelty, and indifference. We poignantly experience our common accountability as the Passion concludes with Christ’s death on the cross. Thereafter, we all take the stage, united as one cast before God. Joining hands we deeply bow, not expecting God’s applause and accolades, but in our most profound sinfulness and shame.
Yet to understand the meaning of Easter is to understand that God loves us so completely that the applause comes anyway; ringing forth in crescendo after crescendo. Tears of joy and disbelief stream down our face; our cheeks hurt from smiling.
Questions for Reflection:
Are you living Lent isolated in a “spiritual bunker”? If so, what can you do to experience this Lent more outwardly?
In life, we never stop “learning our lines”; who has helped you understand and accept this?
Do you allow yourself to experience God’s applause in your life – even when you feel it isn’t deserved?
John Osterholzer
John has been a parishioner at St. Mary’s since arriving on campus as an undergraduate 26 years ago and is currently a faculty member at the Medical School working primarily at the VA hospital. He and his wife, Kathy, were married at St. Mary’s and the parish remains central to the faith formation of their three children (Matthew, 13; Danny, 11; and Sarah, 9).
Email: oster@med.umich.edu