Sixth Sunday of Year C - 7th February 2010

Lent

On next Wednesday, we begin our journey of preparation for Easter. It is a spiritual journey of prayer and penance, by which we Christians allow ourselves to be purified and sanctified by the Lord who wants us to share deeply in His sufferings and his glory.

Lent is our spring-time of new growth and renewed life. Lent is the season to realize that God is continually creating; that God's grace is continually moving through us; that the man or woman who can be open to this creative power and can feel a sense of movement and expansion within is the one who experiences God's life-giving Spirit most fully.

It is a most important time of the year to nurture our inner life. It is the time during which we not only prepare ourselves to celebrate the mystery of the death and resurrection of Jesus, but also the death and resurrection that constantly takes place within us. Life is a continuing process of the death of the old and the familiar, and being reborn again into a new hope, a new trust, and a new love. The death and resurrection of Jesus therefore is not just an historical event that took place a long time ago, but an inner event that takes place in our own heart when we are willing to be attentive to it.

We are asked to respond to this invitation in real and visible ways through prayer, fasting and works of charity that concretely express our solidarity with our brothers and sisters and to let go of everything that prevents us from growing into spiritual maturity. There is hardly a moment in our lives in which we are not invited to detach ourselves from certain ways of thinking, ways of speaking, ways of acting, which we so often deny. Perhaps it is time that we face the truth and seek God's help in renewing and transforming those dark areas of our lives into areas of light and love.

Lent also offers a good opportunity to discover the mystery of Christ within us. It is a gentle but also demanding time. It is a time of solitude but also of community, it is a time of listening to the voice within, but also a time of paying attention to other people's needs. It is a time to continuously make the passage to new inner life as well as to life with those around us.

During the coming two days we should reflect on what needs to be changed in our lives, decide what we should do about it before God, and be ready to kick off our Lenten season on next Wednesday.

May our Lord bless us al on this journey ahead.