By Phillip Grothus
How is your Lent going? Do you feel as if you are driving a nice convertible down a California highway, with the top down, and the wind blowing? There is a nice, calming breeze while Katrina Wave’s song “I’m Walking on Sunshine” is playing, leading you to believe that this Lent is not difficult. Or, are you pulled over on the side of an icy Iowa road because you tried to go to work in a snowstorm? You turn on the radio, only to hear RUN DMC’s “Hard Times” playing, and you say to yourself, “Well, isn’t that ironic?” No matter what state you are in, we all hit that proverbial wall, feeling as if these 40 days will never end, and ponder the thought, “Do Sundays really count?” Tell yourself it’s OK. You are doing Lent well, and you will make it.
I have recently learned that the word dōjō means “place of the way” and heard it connected to a church. What a radical way of thinking. Our church is our dōjō, and it is a beautiful metaphor. Every week, we come to Mass to praise and worship God while we listen to scripture and learn a lesson from ancient writings. If we are too distracted to understand them as they are proclaimed, our deacons or priests will lead us in a homily, a lesson of the day, as some of us would call it. As we continue down this metaphor, deacons and priests are our sensei.
The ultimate sensei is Jesus, the one who created our faith. He taught us so many lessons, but the one to apply in this hard time of Lent is to offer it up to Him. Give Him the things you are struggling with, and He will truly lighten your load to the point where it feels as if it does not exist. Give Him all of your pain, fear, and defeat so you can feel this Lent go by. As it does, you can walk into this dōjō and confidently believe that pain, fear, and defeat do not exist here.