Lent 2020

 

Reflection: Monday of the Third Week of Lent

STM Simply final_300The West Wing is a political drama with which I have a slight obsession. Each break, I cocoon myself in blankets so that only my face peeks out like a matryoshka doll, and I watch the Bartlet Administration tackle America’s problems with grit; drip coffee; and writer Aaron Sorkin’s iconic wit. 

President Bartlet (Martin Sheen) is Catholic and has been known to sport a Notre Dame sweatshirt in the Oval Office. A few seasons in, I noticed a small, wooden plaque on his desk. By extricating an arm with some difficulty from the blanket cocoon and jabbing the spacebar a few times on my laptop, I was able to pause on the correct frame and read: "O God, thy sea is so great, and my boat is so small."

Bartlet is the President of the United States of America, the leader of the free world, and has a Nobel Prize in economics to boot. Yet even his power is minute in the face of the Lord our God. 

As Catholics we are called to embrace our weakness, for in comprehending that weakness we learn to rely upon a power that far surpasses our own. The practice is terrifying and frustrating, especially when fear is drowning out all other thoughts. It’s so easy to retract into our fantasy of control — it’s like a muscle that tenses and must be consciously relaxed again and again. But when we draw our strength from God, we may also take refuge in Him, and that is a powerful place from which to engage with the world. 

We all know that a storm is coming. But we must choose to not feed the tempest with our fear. We must take the plunge, dive in. For as Anonymous wrote, what is a shipwreck when God is the ocean?

Our boats may be small, but we sail together, on the same sea, surrounded by the same boundless love.