The people of Israel were born during the Lent Season of the dessert. Their religious tradition had consecrated Lent Season, the dessert, to pray or to do penance and the greatest penance is solitude, for men who have been created to live within a society: "It is not good for the man to be alone.” (Genesis 2, 18) The people of Israel had already lived this situation when they came out of Egypt, walking through the dessert along the longest way, looking for the Promised Land for forty years.
The shortest way would have been walking up from Egypt towards the Promised Land, Palestine, without leaving main land and without having to go through the Red Sea. Nevertheless, God wanted to protect them, test and educate them to show them His love and talk to their hearts. What would have happened to the people if they had arrived all of a sudden in Palestine and find the Amorreans, Canaanites, Hittites, Jebusites and Philistines among others, all of them pagan and idolater peoples? What would have happened to the Promise?
God’s plans were to create His people, the beginnings of life, where He could fulfill Jesus’ redemption being born from that people. Lent Season today, is an official invitation to the Christian community to renew his cordial commitment towards Jesus’ project, to start all over again and be able to deeply celebrate Easter.
THE DESSERT OF MOSES AND ELIJHA
Moses has also lived his own dessert. As Elijah did in his way to Horeb, and as Jesus did too after He was baptized by John. Now it is the Church’s turn to experience it during forty days in which She has to be devoted to conversion, to prayer, to renunciation and charity. When The Lord puts a person or family to incomprehensive trials, it is necessary to know how to understand, by means of the faith such trial, such obstacle, such persecution of the Pharaoh or several unconscious Pharaohs at the service of love.
“Solitude is the wall and fortress of virtues … “Believe in my experience, you will learn more in the forests than in books; the woods and the rocks will educate you, and they will teach you what teachers cannot”. Wisely writes St. Bernard.
All great Saints, following Christ’s example, have been educated in the school of the solitude of the dessert. However, we cannot bear solitude. When we feel a little alone, we immediately turn on the radio, the television set, the internet, we go to the coffee shop, the bar, the pub, the movies, we are not able to stay with ourselves for a while, listening to our conscience, examining our actions, our plans, that is why, our life is so frivolous, empty and weightless.
The value of words is not for their sound, but for what it means… Many worthless words can be found at the end of a modern life! Let us meditate and listen to God, let us move away from frivolous companies and pastimes, and get closer to friends who help us to be better, let us be more human and less part of a mass. At least during Lent time.
SPOUSAL RECONCILIATION
The Most important thing during Lent Season is that Christian people get ready to listen to God’s words, to convert. To convert is to turn to God. “Reconcile with God”, says St. Paul. Paul reminds us that Jesus Christ started a time of salvation and reconciliation. The apostle fights against those ideas that make people believe that God is more a God of rage than a God of forgiveness. That is why He proposes reconciliation with God through Jesus Christ, in order to abandon our fear of God, who is a source of Tenderness.
Our relationship with God must be based on trust and reconciliation. In 2 Corinthians 5, 20, St. Paul uses the Greek verb “Katakkasso”, “reconcile”, which is characteristic of marriage law that designates spouses reconciliation when they return to the intimate married life they had broken. Therefore, the apostle calls all Christians to go back to that union with God that was broken by sin and to recover the intimacy with “the LORD of hosts will provide for all peoples A feast of rich food and choice wines, juicy, rich food and pure, choice wines” that Isaiah, 25, 6 talks about.
“Convert to me from the bottom of your heart”. The LORD asks for our heart, our best intimacy, the deepest one. He wants that we devote our thought and love to him. That is what God likes the most. He only likes gestures and sacrifices when they come from love, for He only wants love from men because He wants to make them as great, happy and perfect as He is. That is only possible through the love that makes lovers equal.
St. Paul encourages reconciliation for the love of Jesus: “Because God turn Him who did not know the sin, into a sinner, so that we reached the sanctity of God”. The gratitude for so much love must move us closer to the Father, the Spouse.
LOOK AT HIM WITH YOUR EYES FULL OF LOVE
Conversion also means to turn our face, to address to someone who is calling us, because He is compassionate and He is inviting to walk a penitence and interior purification path to renew our faith and live according to it. God does not get tired of calling us, each and every time that we experience the defeat of sin, because He wants us to come back home as the prodigal son, He wants to hold us, and dress us up again and provide us with the feast of His forgiveness and His Eucharist.
“I first got tired of offending Him, than Him of calling me… My Lord, You have punished my wickedness with your mercy,” confesses St. Theresa, who advises: “I only ask you to look at Him”. When you want to receive a message, you turn your face towards the messenger. A look of faith may save a sinner. The first thing to do to convert is to turn your eyes to God, Who “have mercy on all, because you can do all things; and you overlook the sins of men that they may repent.” Book of Wisdom 11, 24.
IT IS HARD FOR AUGUSTINE TO STOP
With the light and the strength that stems from the words, St. Augustine has left us a precious testimony of his struggle in “The Confessions”, to be able to walk away from selfishness and choose a new conception of life. He was very intelligent. nevertheless it was very difficult for him to make up his mind and devote himself to live what he saw so clear: "Not in rioting and drunkenness, not in chambering and impurities, not in contention and envy, but put ye on the Lord Jesus Christ and make not provision for the flesh in its concupiscence" (VI, 13). He listened to his most ancient friends, his passions that told him: “Are you leaving us? Are we not going to be with you any more? Will it not be licit for you to do this and that? Oh my God and what the words this and that mean!” (VIII, 11, 26).
No matter how many efforts a man does, if God does not bless him with his Beauty, his soul falls down. That is why it is necessary that together with David we cry to the Lord: “Mercy, Lord for we have sinned. I am aware of my sins. Make my heart pure. Renew me inside and give me a strong spirit. Give me back the joy of your salvation. Do not send me away from your face. Clean me up from my iniquity. That is how he wrote Psalm 50.
Let us recognize that these voices do not stem from the routine, the passivity and an empty worship. Once these individual and personal actions have been interiorized, it is necessary to confess the sins, making of that particular moment an encounter with God Father through the Spirit and the Blood of His Son that brings us the salvation.
It is true that confession has been substituted by the psychoanalyst’s or psychiatrist’s divan, or what is even more curious and modern, by the television plateau, which shows the need of people to communicate their sins, frustrations and depressions. When people weaken or loose their faith, they seize to these scientific, lay, and even public broadcasting media, as a mean of liberation, while we Christians find it through faith in the reconciliation sacrament.
In addition, the prophet Joel makes a calling to the people so that they change their attitude. The weeping, mourning and black dressing should not be an expression of a superficial piety or the simple desire to call the attention. The voice of the prophet tries to move the foundations of religiousness and turn mourning symbols into the conversion path for all the people. That is why we must change the heart and not the outside.
WITHOUT PRETENSIONS
“When you give alms, do not blow a trumpet before you, as the hypocrites do in the synagogues and in the streets to win the praise of others” (Mathew 6, 2). The Gospel invites us to have a sober, interior and religious attitude. Faith in God and solidarity with our poor brothers and sisters cannot turn into a frivolous show. We see the poor, the lepers, the dehydrated children with swallowed bellies as protected by the screen, as far away, we have got used to see them, we have anesthetized.
Christians’ lives need to be encouraged by the spirit of Jesus, so that solidarity becomes the expression of fraternal love and the relationship with God Father in a worm, intimate and deep environment. Therefore, those religious expressions full of affectations, complications and ostentations do not go with Christian spirituality. People who perform righteous deeds, who pray, who make penitence or sacrifices for human reasons have already received their reward. God will repay those who do it for God, with sincerity and unselfishness as an expression of faith and love.
Nowadays magazines and television programs talk about the agnosticism profession or frequent change of couple. Human rewards are offered more for vices than for virtues. Regarding recognition of God, we have received tremendous lesson from the followers of such a poor religion as Muslims, who have such a convincing and overwhelming faith in Ala. Our baptized agnostics and our shameful Catholics could take note of that.
THE ESSENTIAL, THE DEEP FAITH
The essential meaning of Ash Wednesday is the expression of a deep faith. The signal on our forehead is not a prize for our beliefs. The cross marked with ash reminds us of our fragile human condition and the necessity of transforming our hearts for ever.
This day that marks the beginning of the Lent Season must encourage our desire to cultivate a solid spirituality that reconciles us with God and makes us serve the poor and needy people. The Lent Season sets forth the urgency of considering religion not as a shelter for our lack of authenticity but as a way of expressing our deepest feelings in community.
A REMINDER OF OUR DEATH
The typical instruction to the worshipper while applying the ashes was "Remember, man that you are dust and unto dust you shall return." For a long time, ever since medieval times, a reminder of our mortality and the thought of the futility of life was a means to dominate human being when he felt tempted to forget God and His precepts. Conviction power was through fear, as the psalm says: “Wisdom principle is the fear of God”. For this reason, the approach of Lent Season was obscure and gloomy. This approach was the source of the relief prior to carnivals, which leaves so many traces of social influx of this liturgical season in those societies that were so deeply marked by religion.
LITURGICAL REFORM
The Second Vatican Council proposed an alternative to change the afore-mentioned wording into the words taken from the first sermon of Jesus (Mark 1, 15) “Repent, and believe in the gospel." The text is deep and it is advisable to assimilate it. It goes from a threat to an invitation, from sadness to the joy of the Good News or Gospel.
The “Conversion” must be taken out from the religious language and be incarnated in the real life: to convert means to mend one’s ways, to change and to start a different way. The best penitence, the best way to redeem the bad things we have done is to abandon ourselves with all our faith to the Good News, to God’s proposal in Jesus: The preparation of His Kingdom! and the world’s transformation to speed up His arrival.
THE SPIRIT VIVIFIES
“With corporal fast you hold back our passions, you enhance our spirit, and you give us strength and reward”, says the preface of the day. If God prepares the eschatological feast, which gives us strength to overcome the shortages and tribulations of this exile, Christians must follow the Pope’s advises in his document “Tertio millenio adveniente”, practicing charity through physical and spiritual acts of mercy, especially in favor of needy people.
“There are many Lazarus, who are knocking at society’s doors because they live excluded from prosperity and progress benefits”, writes John Paul II. Let us work together so that everybody can enjoy the feast prepared by God for all the peoples on earth and in heaven. That is the only way that we can listen to the Lord’s Supper and Easter Mass with confidence and hope, the Apocalypse words say: Blessed 5 are those who have been called to the wedding feast of the Lamb." (19.9). At the same time we will offer the world, testimony that we love each other because Jesus was Resuscitated.
St. John Chrysostom writes about Jesus preaching on his way to Jerusalem. Jesus did not hide from His apostles the struggles and sacrifices that were awaiting them. He emphasizes how the renounce to the turns out to be so difficult, but not impossible if we count on the help that God grants us (PG 58, 619s). This is why I invite every believer to a passionate and confident prayer to the Lord, so that He grants each of us a renewed experience of mercy. Only this gift will help us to receive and live Christ’s charity in a more joyful and generous way, because it < is not rude, it does not seek its own interests, it is not quick-tempered, it does not brood over injury, it does not rejoice over wrongdoing but rejoices with the truth. (1 Corinthians 13, 5-6) (John Paul II).
