A long walk through Lent in solidarity with Jesus

There is more to Lent than giving up chocolate. Being with Jesus as he approaches the Cross stirs his followers to respond to cruelty with energy, disruption and defiant prayer.

A few years ago, the community of hospitality where I live invited a Kurdish asylee to stay with us. It was the first time I had lived with someone observing Ramadan, which, in that year, as it does today, overlapped with Lent. While I grumbled about fasting from Instagram, she woke before dawn to pray, eat and drink water before college. We moved our mealtime later so we could still eat together after sunset; even after a full day fasted, she loved to cook. One evening, when iftar came before the rice was ready, I found her sitting at the kitchen counter with a single date, black tea, and her eyes closed. It was one of the holiest things I have ever seen.

It was also, spiritually speaking, one of the most confusing. How could this woman, who had suffered so much, believe that God wanted her to go hungry? Because it reminded her, she told me, that when she thirsted under canvas in the Mediterranean heat, and her stomach twisted with anxious hunger in Calais, God had been with her. Fasting wasn’t reparation, or gratitude, or even penance: it was solidarity. God with her, and she with God, and both with the family she had left behind. It reminded her that God was with her now, as she navigated the casual cruelty of the asylum system, and my cooking.

Thanks to her, solidarity became my way into Lent. I know that this should be obvious: it is, I think, the essence of our liturgical traditions. Staying in dark, cold churches on Holy Thursday evening and shuffling towards the crucifix on Good Friday are all the actions of people who stay, act, and wait while God suffers. But the suffering we are in solidarity with during Lent is not an abstract sentiment figured into wood: it is the panic of a woman shot in the head by an ICE agent; of children in detention centres. Not pious or penitential or something passively undertaken, but the way Jesus lived it: chosen, radical, political. Our Lent ought to disrupt, frustrate and offend: it is a season of solidarity, practised through presence, action and prayer.

I learned this from our Muslim guest, but also among my sisters and activist allies. Not far from our convent in New Jersey, USA, there is an infamous private, for-profit migrant detention centre called Delaney Hall. The centre, which is operated by the GEO Group, has come under fire from migrant rights activists for its dire living conditions. Just before Christmas, Jean Wilson Brutus, a 41-year-old Haitian asylum-seeker, died in custody there “of natural causes”. He died far from home, in a grim migrant prison, days after being arrested and held by Trump’s violent militia. But he did not die far from family, because a small group of volunteers – nuns, friars, local activists – have kept vigil outside ever since Delaney reopened. They provide practical support to visitors and they pray. Because of their enduring presence, Jean Wilson Brutus was surrounded by the prayers of strangers who loved him enough to wait right outside.

“We are there whether it’s 40C or if it’s -13C,” my sister Susan Francois CSJP told me. She has held vigil since the beginning, facing off against ICE and MAGA protesters with a sign saying: “I was a stranger and you welcomed me – Jesus.” She describes it as a spiritual practice: “We pray, and giving hot chocolate to an eight-year-old girl or helping a mum stay warm is prayer too. I know when I leave there that I have done something in the face of the inhumanity in my country. It is an incredible presence of common humanity in a way that I have never seen and, from my perspective, is definitely Spirit-led”.

Presence – as those who have been arrested on anti-ICE and pro-Palestine actions can attest – is a form of direct action. This is incarnational theology, and it was modelled perfectly on Ash Wednesday, when non-violent activists gathered to start Lent by marking the Ministry of Defence with chalk reminiscent of the ash they received down the road at Westminster Cathedral. Pax Christi’s Ash Wednesday vigil is, in my experience, one of the most profound ways to enter Lent. Jesus’ journey through Lent is profoundly non-violent, culminating in one of the most extraordinary acts of non-violence in history: God, crucified, still breathing out love. Direct action against the industry of war is carried on that breath.

“For me it truly marks the beginning of Lent: an occasion to rethink lifestyles, examine our presence in society and reflect on the contribution we make to its betterment,” Ellen Teague,Tablet writer and peace activist, told me. “It’s a spiritual practice, a time of repentance, conversion and of new hope that another world is possible. It reminds me that I cannot be indifferent to injustice and violence in the world.” Another activist, Anne Dodd (no relation), told me her belief in Christ as a non-violent reconciler inspired her commitment. “Every action we take, however small, is intimately connected, all part of the Whole and All centred in Christ, and draws us closer, in the doing, to Christ.”

At the root of all this is prayer; that is, a relationship of radical dependence on God. Ailing capitalism’s labyrinth of cruelty – the system that sustains detention centres and the arms trade – may not crumble because of our placards, but it is weakened by the kind of prayer that changes us. Sr Katrina Alton CSJP helped spark my own vocation with her commitment to non-violent peacemaking. Now the National Chaplain to Pax Christi England and Wales, she told me prayer is a form of resistance. “Each time we say the Our Father we loosen our grip on the lie that this violent, fractured world is all there is. ‘Your kingdom come’ is not escapism; it is an invocation that unsettles the powers and opens cracks for grace to break through. We pray at bedsides, and we must also pray at detention centres, government buildings, and arms manufacturers, where suffering is normalised, administered, and hidden in plain sight. Prayer places our bodies where God’s heart already aches. Lent invites us into truth: let your hearts be broken. Whatever breaks your heart is already breaking God’s.”

I used to hate Lent, perhaps because I was afraid to enter into that broken heart until I lived alongside it in my work with refugees. With them and my sisters I discovered it is not a place to languish; it is a well of energy and action. Jesus’ Lenten journey is a long walk in solidarity towards the Cross, in community with troublemakers and outcasts. Forget giving up chocolate: radical presence, courageous action and defiant prayer are how we are called to follow him.

Liz Dodd is a Sister of St Joseph of Peace. Her Lent book, Easter in Disguise, is published by Bloomsbury (£10.99; Tablet price, £9.89).

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