One of my favorite Scripture quotes comes from Jeremiah: “For surely I know the plans I have for you, says the Lord, plans for your welfare and not for harm, to give you a future of hope…if you seek me with all your heart, I will let you find me, says the Lord, and I will bring you back to the place from which I sent you into exile.” (Jer 29:11-14)

While I love this quote precisely because it reminds me that God is there, always, waiting for me to come around, sometimes it offers more questions than answers. If we are in the throes of suffering or we are watching others suffer, it can make us wonder what exactly God wants us to do to earn release from our “exile”? When we don’t get a response or a clue, it can leave us feeling ignored and abandoned.

As we look around our world, our country, our communities, and our families, we witness suffering that can seem cruel, perhaps even beyond what humans can be expected to bear. It is in moments like these that God may feel distant, unreachable, maybe even absent. It can cause not only spiritual despair but a doubt so deep that we may begin to question the very foundation of faith that has always shored us up.

“Even a believer can sometimes falter when faced with the experience of pain,” Pope Francis has said. “It is a frightening reality that, when it barges in and attacks, can leave a person distraught, even to the point of shattering his or her faith. The person then is faced with a crossroads: he or she can allow suffering to lead to withdrawal into self-doubt to the point of despair and rebellion; or he or she can accept it as an opportunity for growth and discernment about what really matters in life until the time one encounters God.”

As is often the case, the pope’s wise words are difficult to live. Finding an “opportunity for growth” in the hardest moments of our lives or in the pain of those around us can feel like a pious platitude. So, what can we do if we feel ourselves faltering and cannot see our way clear to approach our suffering in such an enlightened way just yet? We can continue to show up in prayer. Daily. Even when it feels as though our spiritual life is a black hole devoid of God’s presence and our prayers words shouted into the wind.

Paulist Father Tom Ryan, leading a retreat I attended years ago at St. Mary’s on the Lake in Lake George, offered one “non-negotiable” when it comes to prayer. “Be faithful to the rendezvous,” he said, following up with a challenging question: “Can you love the God of consolations when the consolations aren’t there?”

Perhaps that is a question each one of us can ponder not just today but any time a prayer isn’t answered in the way we had hoped or isn’t answered at all (at least as far as we can tell). Can we continue to show up and sit in God’s presence anyway, knowing that if we do — through dark and light, joy and sorrow, abundance and scarcity — God will respond to our hungry hearts in God’s own time and release us from our exile?

This column originally appeared in the Jan. 23, 2025, issue of The Evangelist.

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You can get this book in the standard pocket-sized version for only $1.99. If you buy 50 or more — for, say, a parish, a group, or a really big family — the price drops to 99 cents a copy. What a deal! It’s perfect for carrying in a purse or a pocket. Easy to take with you so you don’t miss a day. You can also get a large-print version for only $5.95, which is really nice if you prefer to keep this in your personal prayer space or on a nightstand and like a book with a little more heft. You can get the e-book for only 99 cents, if digital is more your speed. And you can get any of those variations in Spanish. Something for everyone. (Order soon so there are no issues with potential shipping delays, as has been common during COVID.)

This is my fifth book of seasonal Scripture reflections for Liturgical Press. I want to thank all those who have journeyed through past Advent, Lent and Easter seasons with me. I hear from so many of you, and I am so grateful for your emails, letters, comments, and observations.

If you go to the Liturgical Press website, you can get a taste of what’s inside this year’s book. They have the introduction and the first two reflections posted HERE.

Here’s an excerpt from the introduction:

“It’s easy to think, as we begin yet another Lenten journey, that we know the drill. We’ve been here before; we know what’s coming. But the truth is that Scripture is a living thing, always new. I know this firsthand because every time I sit down to write a Lenten reflection about a Scripture passage I’ve heard or read too many times to count, something jumps out at me and makes me say, ‘How did I not notice that before?’ We hear every Scripture reading differently depending on where we are on our life journey, our spiritual journey, or maybe just what side of the bed we woke up on that day. God meets us where we are, and, if we’re paying attention, we can hear God, see God, recognize God in unlikely places, in stories we think we know. When we take time to listen for the still small voice, a scene, a sentence, a word calls out to us as if surrounded by blinking neon lights along a dark
highway, and we are found, even if only for a few minutes…

“…To be honest, there were many days when I sat down with a set of Scripture readings and could not imagine what I might have to say that could be helpful to you. But, after sitting with the Scriptures, reading and rereading, taking them for a walk, sharing a cup of coffee with them as the sun rose outside my window, something always found its way off the page and into my heart, like a delicate shoot pushing through the cold, hard earth of winter into the warmth and light of spring.”

If you begin this journey with me on Ash Wednesday, which falls on February 17, we will be awaiting the delicate green shoots of spring by the time we wrap up on Easter Sunday, April 4. For some — like my family and friends in my old stomping grounds in Austin, Texas — spring will be pushing toward summer at that point. For those of us in the northeast, snow could still be on the ground. Regardless of geographic location, however, we will all have traversed the desert of Lent and Holy Week to emerge into the lush landscape of Easter and resurrection. I would be so grateful if you’d let me walk with you.

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The Lenten desert is real. We can feel the dryness in our lungs when we take a deep breath in our attempts at prayer. We can see withered vines all around us, as we struggle to hang onto the true Vine at the center of it all. How do we get to it, to Him, when time and again the connecting vines pull from their moorings when we grab onto them and take us down another notch into despair? For many of us, this Lenten journey has become our daily lives.

And so, some of us entered this liturgical season with heavy baggage. More cognizant of the many, many people who have suffered at the hands of clerical abuse and the attempts to hide it. More frustrated at the unwillingness of the universal Church to eradicate it and the men who cause it on every level no matter the cost. More furious over what feels like a hijacking of our faith by a criminal element hell-bent on their own twisted agendas over the spiritual well-being of the people—especially the children—they were ordained to shepherd and protect.

Many of us kneel at Mass with these thoughts coursing through our veins. We wish that were not the case, but this is the cross we have been given, a small cross compared with the cross of sexual abuse that others have been forced to shoulder in secret for years, maybe decades. While we may eventually be able to lift off this cross and lay it down, they never will. Their scars are permanent, their crosses welded to the very fabric of their being thanks to the crimes of men using the power and privilege of their collar to take advantage of children and vulnerable adults.

A priest I know—someone who understands how much I am struggling spiritually—asked if there is a way I can have a “Jesus moment,” time with our Lord that is not overshadowed by the problems in our Church. It’s probably a good question for all of us to reflect on during this Lenten season. Where are we meeting Jesus? Can we focus on our relationship with him without getting tangled in the horror stories swirling around us? There’s no easy answer. I think we each have to figure that out on our own because we each are affected by this crisis in different ways, some much more directly and painfully than others.

We stand in the midst of our spiritual desert. If you are finding this desert particularly challenging this year, talk to family and friends who may understand all too well what you’re going through. Pray on it, pray for each other, pray for the survivors who suffer daily, pray for their loved ones who suffer with them.

This season we can allow our time in the spiritual desert to be an opportunity to stand in solidarity with those most affected by the sexual abuse crisis and to join our hearts to theirs in prayer. Like Simon of Cyrene shouldering Jesus’ burden for a brief time on the road to Calvary, we can try to help shoulder the cross for our brothers and sisters who have survived clerical sexual abuse, and together we can walk toward resurrection and new life for ourselves and for our Church.

This column originally appeared in the March 13, 2019, issue of Catholic New York.

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