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During the season of Lent, Joan Chittister will provide a daily reflection to online readers, a kind of
Monastery Almanac for Lent.

Monday, April 6 — Holy Week is the Church’s great celebration of life in all its dimensions: communion
with others in the Spirit, the call to suffer if necessary for the sake of the gospel, the sometimes
loneliness of total commitment and the glory of living in the Christ, whatever the cost. It is a week to
recall your own cost for living the Christian life and drawing strength for the journey from the One who
has lived it before us and now fills us with His own eternal life.

Tuesday, April 7 — This week we walk with a Jesus who finds himself alone in a crowd that chanted his
name but ignored his teachings. It is a political messiah they are looking for, not the messiah of the
Beatitudes. And Jesus, therefore, goes into Jerusalem sad. Rejection is the worst kind of solitude. It
plunges us where we would not be, into the empty depths of life. Clearly, the important thing is to
make a friend of solitude so that no amount of isolation can break the crystal of the spirit.

Wednesday, April 8 — During Holy Week the community will sing Tenebrae, the three days of prayer
that revolve around the Lamentations of Jeremiah the Prophet. For the Jews, the lamentations are five
poems that mourn the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem in the year 586 B.C. For the Christian,
the lamentations refer to the destruction of Christ. The important thing about the lamentations is that
though they face squarely the problems of the present, they are alive with hope in the future. We all
have lamentations in life, sorrow for things we’ve lost or the discovery of the emptiness of all life’s
seductions. The important thing now is to fill ourselves with hope.

Holy Thursday, April 9 — Today we get the sign in the breaking of the bread that the spirit of Christ is
with us always if we live in human community and are dedicated to the teaching of Christ. To celebrate
the Eucharistic life, the community will serve a special meal to the poor today. Then the sisters will
come together with friends and family in the evening to celebrate in a special way what it really means
in life to share bread with one another, to serve one another, to wash one another’s feet, to be full of
the spirit of Christ always, everywhere.

Good Friday, April 10 — Today the community conducts a public saying of the Stations of the Cross for
peace. We walk seven miles in silence, starting at the Cathedral, the public symbol of the Church that
teaches us to lay down our lives for the other. We will pray at stations like the Armory, a symbol of the
militarism of the country; the soup kitchen, a symbol of those made poor by the militarism of the
country; a topless bar, a symbol of the violence against women that machoism and militarism glorify. In
all these places, life is empty of God’s glory and Christ is crucified still.

Holy Saturday, April 11 — Tonight at the Easter Vigil the community will light the Easter fire. We will be
filled finally with the story of salvation and the glory of what it means to have our once empty selves
filled with all the goodness, all the purpose, all the vision, all the glory of life. We will know again that
being monastic in mind, being single-minded about life, being given to one thing and one thing only —
the glory of God — has all been worth it. Van Gogh, the artist, who was born on this day in 1853 said
once: “The best way to know God is to love many things.” That’s why we have to fill life with the best:
the best of music, the best of art, the best of people, the best of literature, the best ideas, the best
of the spiritual life. Lent enables us to deal with the things that may seem to fill us but which really
leave our souls empty and barren.