The older brother in the Gospel parable has such a powerful message for us.

FOURTH SUNDAY OF LENT  C  2019

The Gospel parable today is perhaps the most familiar of all the Gospel parables:  The Parable of the Prodigal Son.  In my own prayer life over the years, I have seen myself at various times as the prodigal son, the older brother, and I have prayed that I have witnessed to the Forgiving Father.  As we prepare to celebrate the Sacrament of Reconciliation in this Lenten season, may we know and experience the forgiving love of the Father as Jesus so beautifully describes in this Parable which could be more rightly called as the Parable of the Forgiving Father.

Today I invite to reflect on the beginning of the parable – simply the first five rather harmless words of the parable: “A man had two sons.” 

There was the younger son who had run away, blew all his inheritance, and acted totally irresponsibly, and then there was the older son who stayed home, budgeted his money and did all that was asked of him.  The sons were as different as night and day.  Yet, despite their differences, they shared the same father.  Though poles apart in personalities, they could not escape the fact that they were brothers.  They were family.  And so, the parable begins: “A man had two sons.”
This parable invites us to look at other groups that are poles apart and perhaps disdain each other at times:  Republicans and Democrats, conservatives and liberals, blacks and whites, rich and poor, Vatican II Catholics and more traditional Catholics, undocumented immigrants and legal citizens and so on and so on.

Think of someone who is different from you, someone that you complain about.  The next time you gripe about him or her; imagine that Jesus would say to you, “A man had two sons.”   What is the message here?   From the perspective of our loving and forgiving Father, we are brothers and sisters to each other.  We are family.  May we treasure that we are all God’s beloved sons and daughters.   God our Father loves each and every one of us, and we are called to witness to the Father’s love to one and all.

I confess that people are able to get under my skin at times.  Perhaps this is true of yourselves as well.  What would it take for us to see those who are different from us, with those who we disagree with, with those who have disappointed us and perhaps those who have even hurt us, what would it take for us to let go our negativity toward them and see them as part of our family, to see them as our brothers and sisters.  Clearly, it is only with the grace of God that we can move beyond our negativity to a place of love and forgiveness.  This is the grace we seek.  This is the grace we seek.

Further we are to extend our love and forgiveness in a spirit of joy, rather than begrudgingly extending a handshake.  Traditionally this Sunday, the fourth Sunday of Lent, is known by its Latin name:  Laetare.  Laetare is the Latin word for rejoice.  There is to be joy in our lives as the disciples of the Lord Jesus Christ.  The Gospel gives us a most significant reason for joy.  Jesus tells us of a God who wishes to shower his sons and daughters with his merciful love.

In this gospel parable, I invite you to consider the stuck point for both the prodigal son and the older brother.  Both sons had a falling out with their father.  The younger was lost in sin and the older son is lost in self-righteousness.  Neither was filled with joy.
The younger son didn’t see what he had.  He imagined that he could have a better life away from his father and family.  That son broke away after demanding his inheritance.  The younger son seems irresponsible, pleasure-oriented, and self-seeking.

The older son also did not see what he had.  However, this son stayed home and did what was expected of him.  The older brother is very responsible and stays at home and works on the farm faithfully day in and day out, but his heart is not in it.  Inside, he had been jealous of his brother, who had the nerve to ask for his inheritance and then skipped to squander it on loose living.  The point is for the older son, although he did all the right things, there was no joy in his heart.

What about us?  Do we experience the joy of the Gospel in our hearts?  In our coming to Mass on Sunday, in living a chaste life, in sharing what we have with others, is our spirituality a burden for us and are we secretly jealous of those who live a more reckless life that we do?  Does our faith bring joy to our hearts – the experience of laetare – or are we carrying the weight of the world on our shoulders in living a spiritual life?

The sons in the Gospel parable did not see what they already had.  Their lives were blessed with the unconditional love their father had for them.  Isn’t it true we don’t see at times what we already have?  Our lives are blessed.  Our God reaches out to us with great love.  In fact, there is nothing we can do that will stop God from loving us.

The older brother in this Gospel parable has such a powerful message for us.  If there is not joy in the practice of our faith, we do not yet know Jesus in our hearts.  Instead of judging what is wrong in our younger’s brother way of living, instead of being judgmental about how others are living, may our focus be on encountering Christ who gives meaning and purpose to our lives.

Yes, we will still experience the suffering and the cross in our Lenten journey and the journey of life.  But even the crosses of life will not keep us from the joy of knowing the Lord and wanting to give Him thanks for the ways our lives are blessed.

In our personal prayer and in all the ways we see the face of God in the lives of others, may our Lenten prayer be that we come to know Jesus more deeply in our hearts. 

Lord Jesus, help me to know you in my prayer.  Lord Jesus help me to know you in my family life.

Have a blessed day.

The Gospel parable of the fig tree is a story about not giving up on ourselves and not giving up on the Church.

These days the Church has been scarred by the struggles of life. The truth is that the Church has always been scarred by the struggles of life. The Church has not always witnessed to the love of Jesus in our world. We need to confess our sinfulness. But just as in the days of Moses, so in our day, the burning bush, the fire of God’s love will not be extinguished within the Church and within us who are the Church. The Church is infused with the fire of God’s love for us. This is and always will be our spiritual anchor. The season of Lent is our time to repent and to become closer to our loving and forgiving God.

The Scriptures are a tale of two trees: the tree that is the bush that is on fire but is not consumed, and in the Gospel the parable of the barren fig tree that yields no fruit.

Jesus tells the parable of the barren fig tree. After three years of waiting, the owner of the vineyard was ready to give up on the tree. Things were not on schedule. It’s time to bail out and cut the tree down. The gardener (representing Jesus in the parable) begs the owner to be patient. Things will turn around. Give it one more year. I will dig around it and put fertilizer on it. If it bears fruit next year, well and good; but if not, you can cut it down.

So too, our growth doesn’t always happen on schedule. In the parable, the gardener knows an extremely important piece of wisdom about life. Everything in life doesn’t run according to schedule. Plain and Simple. No one disagrees with this truth, but it is easy to forget in given situations.

Isn’t it true we have been struggling with our same life issues over many years?  Our discipleship of the Lord Jesus is on our unique schedule and that schedule is more than a bit messy.

The Gospel parable of the fig tree is a story about not giving up on ourselves and not giving up on the Church. It is about growing from the experiences of life. It is about failures that make us grow. Who of us can’t identify with this parable?  Who of us can possibly claim that we have not at times been that barren fig tree – the one who disappointed everyone’s else’s expectations, the one who has already come up short in our Lenten resolves, the one who is still carrying a grudge that should have been let go of long ago, the one who hasn’t walked the talk of Gospel forgiveness.

What are the failures in your life that have helped you to grow?  You would think that by this time in life I would have figured out the right balance between personal prayer and the various activities and ministries in life; you would think that I would have the right balance with spending time with family and my commitment to ministry and the need for relaxation to reenergize myself.  You would think that by this time in life I would be more patient and forgiving.  You would think by this time I would have figured out to keep my golf ball in the middle of the fairway. 

But I, like most of us, are a work in progress and will always be a work in progress.

Today’s Gospel parable challenges us to reflect on patience and forgiveness – probably a need for many of us.   First, we must have patience and forgiveness with ourselves.  We need to allow ourselves the invitation to consider that our failures will help us grow.  We need to allow ourselves to experience God’s unending love for us even though we are not always worthy of God’s love.

Further, we need to share this love and forgiveness with others.  Among our families and friends, there may be someone we have given up on.  The divide is too wide.  They have continually failed to meet our expectations.  The grudge may be permanent, or the injury may have cut so deeply, that amputation seems to be the only resolution.

The Gospel parable calls us to be nonjudgmental.  I am to accept others for where they are at this time in their lives.  Each of us “blooms or bears fruit” in his or her own time, some early, some later in life.  The fig tree inspires us to patience.

Listen again to the Gospel parable, although the fruitless tree had yielded nothing in three years, the gardener implores: “Sir, leave it for this year also, and I shall cultivate the ground around it and fertilize it: it may bear fruit in the future.”

The Gospel provides new hope and invites us to always try again.  Forgive the past and look to the future.  May our two mantras today be:  May our failures help to grow.  Secondly, forgive the past and look  to the future.

Thankfully the God of today’s Gospel parable and the God of the burning bush doesn’t give up on us. God is a God of second and third chances. God’s burning bush of love is within us. Jesus the patient gardener calls us to bear fruit. Yes, this Lenten season is about conversion. It is about growing in our relationship with God. It is about repentance and bearing fruit that enables us to grow more fully into a Gospel way of living.

Some of us in the spiritual journey have a spiritual director or a soul friend, a trusted person with whom we can share the secrets of our hearts. What a gift to have that kind of a friend.  In a deeper sense, life itself is our best spiritual director. In our lives, we are standing on holy ground. What makes that ground holy? God is present in the burning bush of his love that is within us, and God is present to us in the burning bushes of the circumstances of our lives. Even when we seem like the barren fig tree, when we are overwhelmed by the struggles, be assured that Jesus, the patient gardener goes with us and invites us to take the risk of being vulnerable, in trusting that his love for us unending. May we have the grace of spiritual sightedness to recognize the holy ground of God’s love on which we are standing?

I invite you this evening to reflect upon your day -- its joys and its struggles -- to consider how your failures are an opportunity to grow, and this day you are standing on holy ground as the fire of God’s love is burning with you.

Have a Blessed day.

It is our Transfiguration faith that enables us to believe in the deep truth that in dying we are born to eternal life.

SECOND SUNDAY OF LENT   C  2019

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                          

 From the Gospel, Jesus took Peter, James and John and went up to the mountain to pray.  While he was praying, his face changed in appearance and his clothing became dazzling white…Then from the cloud came a voice that said, “This is my chosen Son; listen to him.”

Peter said to Jesus, “Master it is good that we are here; let us make three tents, one for you, one for Moses, and one for Elijah.”  The sight of Jesus transfigured in his risen glory, flanked by two of the most significant leaders of their nation’s history, was unmistakably impressive to the disciples.  It is no surprise that Peter wanted to hold onto the moment, pitch some tents, and stay awhile.  Wasn’t this hour the summation of a career, as good as it was likely to get?  Why leave, when it was literally downhill from here?  From Peter’s perspective, it would be easier to stay on the mountaintop, but that wasn’t the mission of Jesus.

What Peter didn’t understand was something Paul would later explain, that Jesus did not deem equality with God something to be grasped at.  Jesus did not hold onto golden moments or hang out in towns where the healings and teaching made him something of a superstar.  Rather, Jesus emptied something to take on our humanity.  That was the plan.  And he kept to the plan all the way to the cross.

What is the meaning and purpose of the Transfiguration of Jesus?  Jesus knew very well that His journey to Jerusalem, his passion and death, were going to be overwhelming for His followers.  They would need a faith perspective to make sense out of His suffering and death.  To sustain them in their moments of questioning and doubts and disbelief and desperation, Jesus wanted to provide His disciples with a glimpse of Him in his risen glory.  Being filled with the Transfiguration faith perspective, they could better trust that even His passion and death were part of the mystery of God’s saving love for us.

Without a faith perspective, the Passion of the Christ is much too brutal and horrific.  The Transfiguration gave the disciples a preview, a context to situate the passion of Christ into the paschal mystery of the passion, death and resurrection.  If the apostles were to be sustained to come to a resurrection faith, they needed the flashback of the Transfiguration glory to sustain them in the valley of the Lord’s passion.

We too need to be sustained in our valleys of doubt and confusion.  The grace we seek is to be able to recognize the Transfiguration moments in our own lives.  This doesn’t mean we have to go Fatima or Lourdes or Medugorje.  May we not overlook the traces of divine revelation in the ordinary events of life.   As the apostle Paul suggests in today’s second reading, God is revealed in the goodness of others.  The goodness of others is revealed in ordinary lives.  It is the way they are living these lives than make them extraordinary.  To recognize our Transfiguration moments, we must have eyes that see beyond what we ordinarily see.

Stephen Covey tells of an experience he had on a New York subway one Sunday morning.  The people on the subway were sitting quietly.  Some were reading newspapers, some were dozing, and others were simply contemplating with eyes closed.  It was a rather peaceful, calm scene.  At one stop a man and his children entered the car.  The children were soon yelling back and forth, throwing things, even grabbing people’s newspapers.  It was all very disturbing and yet the father just sat there and did nothing.  It was not difficult to feel irritated.  Stephen could not believe the man could be so insensitive as to let his children run wild and do nothing about it.  So finally, with what he thought was admirable restraint and patience, he said to the man:  “Sir, your children are really disturbing a lot of people.  I wonder if you couldn’t control them a bit more.”  The man lifted his gaze as if coming into consciousness for the first time and said:  “Oh, you’re right.  I guess I should do something about it.  We just came from the hospital where their mother died about an hour ago.  I don’t know what to think, and I guess they don’t know how to handle it either.”

Stephen then said:  “Can you imagine how I felt at that moment?  Suddenly I saw things differently.  Because I saw differently, I felt differently, I behaved differently.  My irritation vanished.  My heart was filled with this man’s pain and grief.  “Your wife just died.  I’m so sorry!  What can I do to help?”

Nothing changed in the subway car.  All was the same:  the same people, the same irritation, the same kids.  What did change was a way of seeing it all and a change in behavior.

This is the Grace of Transfiguration.  We are able to see differently.  The sufferings, the crosses of our life are not a dead end street.  We seek to be able to look at life from the vantage of faith, of our faith in Jesus.

Are you able to see that the particular crosses in your life now with a Transfiguration/Resurrection faith that enables to trust that God goes with you and the crosses of life are not a dead end street; rather they are the pathway to our sharing in the risen life of Christ.

As we reflect on the dark cloud of sexual abuse in our Church today, may each of us with a Transfiguration faith ask ourselves what can we do to help; what can we do to make a difference and rebuild trust and integrity in the leadership of our Church.

During this Lenten season in the spiritual disciplines we have embraced, may we commit to journey with the crucified Christ so that we fully share in the risen life of Jesus in the Easter season.   If we are able to look at the crosses of our lives with a Transfiguration faith, the crosses are part of our discipleship of Jesus; the crosses are painful; but be assured these crosses are our pathway to sharing in the risen life of Jesus.  It is our transfiguration faith that enables us to believe in the deep truth that in dying we are born to eternal life.

Have a blessed day!

This Lent, into what desert are we being led by the Spirit?

FIRST SUNDAY OF LENT  C  2019

There is the story of the famous scientist Einstein who was on a train in Europe.  The conductor asked him for his ticket.  He checked his pockets and then his wallet and he wasn’t able to come with it.  Then the conductor, seeing Einstein’s frustration in not being able to find his ticket, said:  “Don’t worry Mr.  Einstein, we trust you.”  Sometime later, the conductor returned to the train car and saw Einstein now on his knees looking for the ticket under his seat.  The conductor again told Einstein not to worry about it.

Einstein responded:  “Thank you, but I need the ticket to remind me where I’m supposed to be going.”

In a similar way, we need the Lenten season to focus us on the meaning and direction of our lives as well.  Lent is a time when we, like Jesus, are led by the Spirit into the desert -- into the depths of ourselves, into our inner wilderness, so to speak, away from the world of achievements.

God led the people of Israel into the desert, to forge them into a new people.  The Spirit led Jesus into the desert to clarify the meaning of his Messiahship.  The Spirit leads us into the desert of Lent to reflect on how we have not always resisted temptation and have failed to love.  In the desert we seek mercy and forgiveness.  Lent is God’s gift to us to become more aware that we are God’s redeemed and forgiven people.

May our mantra for the Lenten season be the words spoken to us as ashes were placed on our foreheads on Ash Wednesday:  “Repent and believe in the Gospel.”

In the Lenten season, we seek to enter the same space as Jesus.  We are led by the Holy Spirit into the desert to experience fasting and self-denial and to be tempted and to be tested by the devil.  As disciples of the Lord Jesus, we are tested; we are tried during the Lenten season to gauge our commitment of turning away from sin and being faithful to the Gospel.  How do we deal with the Lenten call to embrace spiritual disciplines?  What fasting are we willing to embrace in the Lenten season?  What spiritual discipline of prayer can we make a commitment to?  What almsgiving, what are willing to tithe in the service of others?

The story of Jesus’ temptations reveals to us the deepest thing about him:  he had total trust in his heavenly Father.  Jesus turned to the Word of God in the face of temptation and expressed his trust, his obedience to God’s plan for him.

This Lent, into which desert are you being led into by the Spirit?

My hope for myself and for you is that you will encounter the Lord in prayer this Lenten season.  May this encounter fill you with joy and inner peace.  Make a decision, for example, to pray the Stations of the Cross on the Friday Evenings of Lent with other parishioners, experience the merciful love of Jesus in the Sacrament of Reconciliation this Wednesday on the diocesan day of penance from 12:30 till 7:00pm, and celebrate the Eucharist more frequently during Lent.

May our Lenten prayer further motivate ourselves to share the merciful love of Jesus with others.  Participate in one of the corporal works of mercy:  Feed the hungry, clothe the naked, shelter the homeless.  Make a difference in the lives of people in need.

For example, the rationale behind your generosity to operation rice bowl is that our Lenten sacrifices become the source of hope and change for some of our poorest brothers and sisters around the world.  May our Lenten spiritual disciplines lead us to share what we have with those who are hungry and in need of our generosity.

Yes, we are called to make a difference as the disciples of Jesus.  What commitment will I make that will enhance the world, aid the poor, and provide resources for building up the kingdom of justice, love, and peace?

What about ourselves?  What tempts us?  What do the temptations of our lives reveal about us?  What are the areas of our lives in which Jesus is not Lord?  Hopefully our temptations, our sinfulness reveal our need for God’s forgiveness and mercy, and, indeed, we are the gracious recipients of the merciful love of Jesus.

In today’s psalm response, we pray:  “Be with me Lord when I am in trouble.”

This psalm prayer is so appropriate for us in the Church today as we are living under the dark cloud of clergy sexual abuse.  I pray and we all pray:  “Lord can we possibly remain in a Church when our precious children have been placed in harm’s way?”  This experience of the cross is our undoing as a credible Catholic Church.  Who can we trust to provide leadership for our Church?  The sexual abuse scandal and the cover-up of this sandal seems to be the news every day.  How can we as a Church be more pro-active in rooting out once and all the causes and the people involved in this grave sin?

We as a Church need an action plan and we need to turn to the Lord with the prayer of the psalmist:  “Be with me Lord when I am in trouble.”

This experience of the cross in the life of the Church is most serious and deserves our best response as trust in the leaders of the Church is on the line. 

May we ponder in these days of Lent on how we are to encounter the Lord in this experience of the cross of clergy sexual abuse in the life of the Church?  How is God present to us and to the Church in this time of trouble?  We deeply believe the Lord has not abandoned the Church in this time of trouble, nor are we called to abandon the Church in this time of trouble.  In a deep-rooted manner, we the Church must die to this sinfulness and this grave violation of leadership among our priests so that we will rise as a Church through the transforming power of grace to be the Church we are called to be.

Some of the crosses of Lent are or our choosing, for example, our commitment to fast during Lent; other experiences of the cross are not of our choosing, as is the sexual abuse crisis.  But in all experiences of the cross, we are called to encounter the Lord – the crucified as well as the risen Lord.  I pray in the words of the psalmist:  Be with me Lord when I am in trouble.

Have a blessed day.

Our blessed ashes acknowledge that we are sinners, but the Word of God today invites us to open our lives to the transforming power of God's grace.

On this Ash Wednesday, we consider the spiritual practices to guide our journey to Easter.

We consider Prayer, Fasting, and Almsgiving.  These are needed spiritual exercises to prepare for our celebration of Easter.  We need to embrace spiritual disciplines in order to place God first in our lives.

While what we are going to give up is on our minds as we begin our Lenten journey, the Word of God  on Ash Wednesday wants us to focus on God. What does God desire to do for us this Lent?  Focus is on God.   

I suggest we begin with God’s plan for us.  From the first Scripture reading, the prophet Joel tells us that gracious and merciful is the Lord, slow to anger, rich in kindness and relenting in punishment.

Today’s Scriptures invite us to open our lives to the transforming power of God’s redeeming grace.  Grace is the divine answer to our human condition.

Our Catholic doctrine of original sin acknowledges the sinfulness of the human condition. 

In a personal way, today we all confess that we are sinners as symbolized by the ashes on our forehead.    We are sinners before our God.  The light of Christ that is within us has been dimmed by our sinfulness.

But sin in not our final answer.  God’s love, mercy, and forgiveness is the great mystery we are invited into in our Lenten journey.  As we celebrate this mystery of the Eucharist, may we begin our Lenten journey with our eyes on God – on God’s merciful love for us.

Yes, our blessed ashes acknowledge the weakness of our human condition, and proclaim we stand in need of God’s healing forgiveness.  Thus, we embrace the spiritual disciplines of Lent to reconcile ourselves with God and with one another. 

As St. Paul writes:  “Now is a very acceptable time.  Now is the day of our salvation.”

Have a blessed Lent. 

Get the heart right, Jesus is saying, and all else falls into place.

Eighth Sunday of OT  C  2019

For the 3^rd consecutive Sunday, the Gospel has been taken from Luke’s account of the Sermon on the Mount.  The last two Sundays we have been invited to reflect on what to do.  The Beatitudes call us to a way of life in which our values are turned upside down.  “Blessed are the Poor;  Blessed are they who hunger;  Blessed are they who mourn.  These people are most in touch with the spiritual dimension of life.  They more clearly know their need for God's grace. 

 

Last Sunday the Gospel calls us to love even our enemies.  That doesn’t come naturally for any one of us.  It’s not in our genes.    It is only with the grace of God and the example of Jesus himself that we are empowered to love our enemies.

This Sunday’s Gospel tells us how we can live out our discipleship of Christ Jesus in which we are called to love our enemies.    Where the Gospel last week dealt with action towards others, now we seem to have something that is trying to reach deeper: to the wellspring of action found in the human heart. Get the heart right, Jesus seems to be saying, and all else will follow.

The Gospel theme this week is:  Get the heart right and all else falls into place. Religion, and above all judgment made in the name of religion, must proceed from conversion of heart.

This weekend we had a pre-cana session with couples preparing for their wedding day.  Pre-Cana is the spiritual preparation for the sacrament of marriage.  If the couples have their heart right in their love for each other, all else will fall into place.

Plain and simple, the conversion we seek must come from the inside.  We need to be aware of our inner life, our interior life if we are to live out the Gospel demands in our outer life.  Jesus in the Gospel proclaims the tree cannot bear good fruit unless the core of the trunk of the tree is solid.  “A good tree does not bear rotten fruit, not does a rotten tree bear good fruit.  For every tree is known by its own fruit.”  So too, a good person out of the store of the goodness in his heart produces good fruit, for from the fullness of the heart the mouth speaks.

Yes, we are all capable of wearing masks.  Some of us are very good at wearing masks.  We seek to make a good impression; put our best foot forward.   However, if our masks do not come from the depths of our hearts, they can easily take on the hypocrisy of the scribes and Pharisees.

I confess to wearing a mask at times that wants to give the impression that I don’t have a fragile, vulnerable side, that I have it all-together. That’s a mask I sometimes wear but it is not my best self.  Many of us struggle to acknowledge the various masks we wear to cover our weaknesses, our demons.

The Gospel today further explain the meaning of the words of Jesus:  Be merciful just as your Father is merciful.”  When we witness to the mercy of Jesus, it enables us to get the heart right.

Jesus opens today’s Gospel account with a parable:  “Can a blind person guide a blind person?  Will not both fall into a pit?”  This leads to ask what blindness Jesus is talking about?  I suggest for our prayer today we see the blind guides that Jesus refers are leaders who don’t know their own need for mercy, who have not experienced mercy, and who therefore cannot act with mercy.

The Penitential Rite is part of the beginning rites of our Eucharistic celebration.  For us to enter into the mystery of God’s presence among us, we first acknowledge our need for the healing forgiveness of God.  Before receiving Communion, we humbly pray:  “Lord, I am not worthy that you should come under my roof, but only say the word and my soul shall be healed.”

The genuineness of our leadership is dependent upon our humility and our humble recognition that we need the mercy of a forgiving God and we are to share this mercy with others,

Jesus shows the meaning of mercy as He called people beyond their faults.  In fact, the only people   Jesus ever called condemned were those who chose to ignore the invitation of Jesus and refused to admit their need for conversion and growth.

The cross of Jesus is His great act of love for us.  We encounter the mercy, the forgiveness, and the love of Jesus for us.

Jesus didn’t promise to give anyone perfect knowledge or judgment, only the power to forgive without limits – a faculty that presumes that we all make a good share of mistakes.

Please God   we are always aware that we are sinners who stand in need of a forgiving, healing God.  As we approach Ash Wednesday, the ashes to be placed on our foreheads announce that the light of Christ that is burning within us is dimmed.  It has been darkened by sim symbolized by the ashes on our foreheads.  With these ashes, we are confessing and announcing we stand in need of God’s forgiveness.  Further, we commit ourselves to the penitential season so that we will be reconciled with God and so prepare  ourselves  for the joy of Easter.  The ashes we receive are blessed ashes, holy ashes, and they hold the promise of cleansing protection and, most importantly, the promise of resurrection.

Our upcoming Lenten journey invites us to become more aware of our inner life, our spiritual life before God.  The Lenten season invites us to accept the disciplines of prayer, fasting and self-denial.  In following these spiritual disciplines, we come to know the Gospel Good News.  The Good news is precisely this:  it tells us about a God who gives first, loves first, who loves unconditionally, who loves us whether we deserve it or not. 

May the spiritual disciplines of Lent lead us to an image of a God who loves us unconditionally.  What is our response to this God?   We gather in the Eucharistic celebration to give thanks to the Lord our God.  Because of God’s extravagant love for us, we are grateful and we seek to share that love with one another. 

Have a Blessed Day