By Fr. Jeremy Miller, O.P.

In recent weeks, I have been pondering the experience of “being covenanted,” a real blessing of acceptance and affirmation, and the fact that it is never an unmixed bliss. Some element of pain, of unfulfillment, ever lurks. I recall Cardinal Newman writing that such is “the rule of life here below.”

Whether it was the subconscious impress of this pondering or the Bible readings we will be hearing during the Sundays of Lent which I just read through, the experience of Covenant and Cross will be the thread running through these meditations. I ought to begin by saying what these meditations are not meant to be. They are not to be analyses of the Sunday readings. Preachers and Lenten Bible Study groups can make use of the many fine commentaries circulating these days. Nor are they meditations out of thin air. Instead they will have a gentle anchoring in each Sunday’s readings and are directed to your own use, or better yet, your family’s.

When was the last time you took an outdoor walk with your young son or daughter to instruct them in the things of God. from the things of nature around you? Or whenever did your parents take such a walk with you? “Oh,” you say, “Jeremy is going to describe what Jesus did.” Jesus did teach in this way, to be sure, but so did Israelite fathers centuries before.

Whenever a rainbow appeared in the Palestinian skies, the father would say to his son or daughter, “back in the time of Noah, after the wickedness of many men and women brought a flood of destruction upon them, God made a promise that He would never be far from us. He claimed all the earth and everyone living on it as His very own. And this rainbow from the God above is the sign of our Covenant with God.”

When you hear the Noah story this Sunday, and its famous rainbow sign, examine your own role as a parent and teacher of the things of God. Do my children learn from me that the earth is good, that its natural elements are not to be misused, that every living person on it belongs in some way to God, that in the human family covenanted to God there are no “kikes” or “niggers” or “micks” or “krauts” or those other terms with which we pass on prejudices from generation to generation? Do they learn from me, from the way I act and pray and live, that the rainbowed earth carries the presence and impress of Noah’s God, a presence in the simple things of the earth which so easily gave occasions to most of Jesus’ teachings. I recall a PEANUTS strip in which Charlie Brown was quoting, as he does surprisingly from time to time, Meister Eckhart (14th century Dominican mystic) to the effect, “if you

cannot experience God in a field but only in a Church, you will really not find him in a Church building either.”

But what of the pain, what of the Cross which seems always a part of the Covenant? The Gospel for this Sunday is Mark’s very brief account of Jesus’ temptation in the wilderness, so brief that it will have been read through before we can savor any details. Look at Mark 1: 12-13 before going to Mass. Jesus is driven into the desert and through forty days tempted. Does Jesus experience a peaceful covenanted earth?

The earth is God’s and its peoples, says the Book of Genesis, but it is a painful place too, the pain from its peoples, the pain from its harsh elements. This Lenten message emerges: being covenanted, being pained. When Jesus emerges from his personal desert, from the satanic temptations of the world about Him, he proclaims from out of this pain that not only is the earth still God’s but that God’s Kingdom is at hand. God will dominate and set under foot the hostility.