Friends and fellow travelers,

Greetings to you at this unfolding of Spring here from MN. The snow is melting, moist air blows over the ice, melt water streams down the paths into puddles, and Hannah got new rain boots to jump right in :-)

How greatly have we been waiting for Spring! After these years of isolation and cloistering at home, Spring comes and yet we arrive at another catastrophe unfolding in Europe scaring the whole world that helplessly watches.

“So how are you dealing with the news from Europe?” concerned neighbors are asking when we meet at our outings walking the neighborhood which is awakening from its winter sleep.

“Cursing psalms” is our brief answer, and then for those who look puzzled, “cursing psalms and living each moment…” Both keep us alive.

When monastic communities meet for their daily prayers they pray through the psalms, all the psalms, at least every month. Thus, they are familiar with the different modes and moods of the psalms. And they know there is a time when only a cursing psalm seems appropriate to cope with the evil of the world unfolding in-front of our eyes.

Chuck remembers the day when he was in need of a cursing psalm. He was assigned to give a chapel talk at St Olaf College, and it happened to be the morning after 9/11. He tossed his talk on the Psalms away and spoke about the cursing psalms instead. So if you are in need of contemplating (or writing) a cursing psalm retreat to Chuck’s Lenten reflection here.

The monastic “momento mori”, the task to contemplate our mortality in order to live life fully, might almost seem grotesque in these days when we meet for lunch while talking about war. But still, and perhaps especially now, it calls us to hold together both: The vulnerability of all life given to us, as well as the invitation to celebrate and protect life in all things at any given moment.

Thus, during the “great thawing” here in MN, when the sun licks away the last snow, and the grass, hidden for a whole season, comes back to life, and viriditas is humming in the air and dripping from the sugar maple trees into buckets, I am also reminded of the spirit of 1989, when the Berlin Wall fell in my home country after a long “cold war.”

The free world has taken its freedom too long for granted, and almost bored by it has turned on itself to politicize it. The current news of people defending their freedom from a very real aggressor with their very lives reminds us, how existential freedom indeed is and that it needs to arise in the heart of a person in order to overcome fear, anger and isolation.

In these Lenten days when I need to remind myself also to fast from too much news I found a great article on this “spirit of 1989” and its reemergence in the streets of Ukraine by Bates professor Austin Harper. It gave words to an inkling in me I could not voice myself yet and that suggest that bearing tragedy may be the price we pay in a nuclear age. You might find it helpful, too.

So my prayer is simple these days: For a change of heart to save the world.

Friends, Lenten is a time when we are reminded of practicing simplicity and to tend to our sorrows and the sorrows of the world. As Spring awakens what has been sleeping before to new life, thus our lives need to be awoken anew to greening and flourishing.

Coming up, March 21 is the birthday of Johann Sebastian Bach, the great German composer and consoler. He has known quiet well that we must hold our sufferings up into the light of mercy in order to redeem them from their shadow being into light.

His Passion oratorio(s) is what has given me consolation, when I sang it with the Munich Bach choir back home, and in the last years, when I invited our fellow travelers to join us in our Passion Week Consolations with JSB.

This year I invite you again to come with us on this pilgrimage from the night of our sorrows to the light of renewed hope. Walk with us, lament with us, listen with us to Bach’s ethereal music and let it change our hearts, once again.

Together, but each on our own, we will walk from Palm Sunday to Easter Sunday, consoled by Bach’s Passion and brief reflections arising in my heart.

This is a self paced program with daily emails at our Cloister online community. To learn more and to enroll click here.

Last but not least a blessing:

May peace prevail.

Almut with Chuck & little one