In our women’s Lenten book study at my parish, we are exploring The Wilderness Within by Sister Josephine Garrett, CSFN. This book presents a reflection for prayer and meditation and space to journal about what Jesus is doing in our hearts.
First, I love the imagery of our hearts being a wilderness. That the heart is a place that is vast, wild, open, free and offering much to explore resonates with me. I am a person who prefers to be outdoors, and in the wilderness, as my husband and I enjoy visiting a remote area of Montana often.
For many of us, God feels so close to us when we are in outdoors and in nature in the quiet and the stillness. Oddly enough, Sister Josephine explains in one of her videos that she does not enjoy being outdoors — and in fact she had a funny experience of helping a formation director with some gardening projects that confirmed that understanding of herself preferring to be indoors!
Sr. Josephine emphasizes that in this wilderness within us, we are not alone; Jesus is there in our hearts. He is walking with us this Lent and He is offering us an invitation to receive His love — perhaps in a new way — and to respond to His love perhaps in a new way.
She states, “This journey into the wilderness of the heart is not for the purpose of egotistical navel-gazing.” Ouch! Isn’t this often true? We get so caught up in what we are “doing” for Lent that we can miss the point of Jesus loves us and walking with us in this season. We can become almost obsessed with our Lenten “objectives” that we miss the point of allowing Him to transform us through His love.
She continues, “Rather, by the end of Lent, this journey will help you gather more of your heart up into your hands and offer it to Jesus to enter into, to reign in, to be used for the service of the kingdom.”
This season is about Jesus and letting him work on the wilderness within us. He invites us, loves, moves us, lifts us up into new and wild places that perhaps we’ve never gone to before so we can become a new creation.
I am pleased by Sister Josephine’s openness to how Jesus might invite us to change what we are doing throughout Lent as I’ve never done that. I am already sensing that Jesus is asking me to explore fasting in different ways during this time. I’ve been reading more about fasting and how ancient Christians developed a rhythm to fasting throughout the year — not just in Lent where there is some fasting, some feasting that varies by day, week, month and season.
Sister Josephine challenges us to use Thursdays as a mental health check-in day. (She is a mental health professional.) Thursday is the day the Lord celebrated the Last Supper, and her invitation is to keep a focus on the Eucharist, body, blood, soul and divinity, especially on this day — and to reflect on how we are making the love of Jesus incarnate by answering His call to live Eucharistically.
Finally, I was struck by how she used the word “rend,” meaning “to tear” — to tear open our hearts to reveal a spirit of acceptance and curiosity about the wilderness within us.
From Joel 2:13. “Rend your hearts, not your garments, and return to the LORD, your God for He is gracious and merciful, slow to anger, abounding in steadfast love, and relenting in punishment.”
So, as we enter into the vast and perhaps unexplored wilderness of our hearts this Lenten season, where there may be entanglements and areas that are overgrown, untended, and unexplored, we are called to move there with joyful expectation, with courage and with a holy desire to grow closer to Jesus on this journey of becoming more like Him.