Father Benjamin Hawley offers Lenten
lecture series at Carmelite monastery

By Sean Gallagher

Jesuit Father Benjamin Hawley invited his listeners at the Carmelite Monastery of the Resurrection in Indianapolis to make the Lord the center of their lives during the season of Lent.

This invitation came on Feb. 10 during the first of a series of three lectures titled “Lent Is the Church’s Spring” that Father Hawley is giving at the Monastery of the Resurrection, 2500 Cold Spring Road. The last two lectures will be on Feb. 24 and March 10, both beginning at 7 p.m. The lectures are free and open to the public.

Over the course of these lectures, Father Hawley, president of Brebeuf Jesuit Preparatory School in Indianapolis, will explore how Jesus is portrayed in the Gospel of St. Luke, the parables found there and their relevance for our day-to-day life of faith.

He began by describing Lent as a journey then asked his listeners to allow Jesus, in very practical yet profound ways, to be their companion on it.

In order to do this, Father Hawley suggested that his listeners reflect upon how they are tested then consider how Christ was tested in the very same way.

“The examples that you can come up with from your own life,” he said, “are examples of how Jesus himself was tested. He was tested like us. We are tested like him.”

Father Hawley then pointed to a facet of his Jesuit tradition to help his listeners allow Jesus to become a companion in their daily lives.

“Ignatius says in the [Spiritual] Exercises,” he said, “when we make the prayers of the meditations of the Exercises, we should feel as though God was speaking with us as a friend speaks to a friend.”

Father Hawley then explored how the work of the Holy Spirit is vital for us in practical ways to make Jesus our companion through Lent. He started this by showing the Holy Spirit’s important place in the Gospel of Luke and especially in Jesus’ baptism.

After encouraging his listeners to pray for an outpouring of the Spirit in their own lives like the one that happened to Jesus in his baptism, he went on to explain how it can help us gain a more clear understanding of our vocation.

“The Lord baptizes you and me with a sense of a vocation, with a specific vocation,” he said. “The Lord leads us, then, into that way of living, which is a way of living, a way of being and also a way of service, always a movement from ourselves outwards.”

After discussing the relevance of Jesus’ baptism in our own life of faith, Father Hawley explored the meaning for us of what happened next in Jesus’ life: his temptation in the desert.

“If you take the three temptations together, what are they about?” he asked. “The temptations in the Gospel are about a fundamental orientation toward life. And that fundamental orientation is an orientation toward God, toward the Lord.

“Now, what is your and my fundamental orientation? This is a very important question for you and me to ask ourselves during Lent because we’re oriented toward all sorts of things.”

Father Hawley argued that an orientation toward God is manifested by our allowing Jesus to be a real companion in our daily journey of faith.

Toward the end of his lecture, Father Hawley invited his listeners to pray with him a prayer adapted from the beginning of the Spiritual Exercises, which asks God to help us orient our lives on him in very mysterious, yet realistic ways.

In conclusion, he returned to his theme that Lent is the Church’s spring.

“Lent is the Church’s spring,” he said. “Lent is the period in which that which is dormant inside us … that which is hurt, has an opportunity to receive in a new way a baptism, an anointing of the Holy Spirit.

“And we do that with Jesus on his walk. As he walks, we walk with him. As we walk with him, he walks with us.” †