Editorial

Lent helps us to renew ourselves spiritually and live holy lives

Pope Francis has offered us a powerful reflection on how we should observe this sacred time of Lent.

The Holy Father said:

“[This] is a time to act, and in Lent, to act also means to pause. To pause in prayer, in order to receive the word of God, to pause like the Samaritan in the presence of a wounded brother or sister. Love of God and love of neighbor are one love. … For this reason, prayer, almsgiving and fasting are not three unrelated acts, but a single movement of openness and self-emptying. … Then the atrophied and isolated heart will revive. Slow down, then, and pause! The contemplative dimension of life that Lent helps us to rediscover will release new energies.”

Too often, we forget to pause, to listen, and to learn what God is calling us to be and do. Lent gives us a chance to be contemplative for a change and, like the Blessed Virgin Mary, to “ponder” in our hearts the mysterious ways that God is working in our life.

Lent invites us to contemplate our own mortality and to ask ourselves what the reality—and inevitability—of our death means. This should not be a morbid exercise. After all, the heart of the Christian message is that sin has been conquered, and death has been overcome through the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ. Only in light of this fundamental truth—that Christ has been victorious in the face of death—can we renew ourselves spiritually and live holy lives.

Recently, Pope Francis offered some reflections on things that can become obstacles in our efforts to grow spiritually.

The Holy Father said:

“Every day the Lord visits us, speaks to us, reveals himself in unexpected ways and, at the end of life and time, he will come. He himself exhorts us to stay awake, to be vigilant, to persevere in waiting. Indeed, the worst thing that can happen to us is to let ‘our spirit doze off,’ to let the heart fall sleep, to anesthetize the soul, to lock hope away in the dark corners of disappointment and resignation.”

To hear the Lord when he speaks to us, we have to be alert—not distracted by the busyness of life and not so soundly asleep that we miss the Lord when he comes.

In his reflections, Pope Francis identifies two obstacles to being awake spiritually. The first obstacle is “neglect of the interior life.” This happens when we lose a sense of enthusiasm and allow weariness and negative experiences to turn us into angry and embittered people.

When this occurs, there is no life left in us. No enthusiasm or vitality remains in our spiritual life. To overcome this obstacle (neglect of the interior life), we must create opportunities for prayer, reflection and the proper nourishment of our spiritual lives. We must allow God to renew us spiritually.

The second obstacle noted by Pope Francis is “adapting to a worldly lifestyle, which ends up taking the place of the Gospel.” Too many of the values promoted by our secular culture, especially consumerism, eroticism, materialism, racism—and all of the other “ism’s” that are so prevalent today—make it very difficult to live as Jesus taught.

To overcome this obstacle, we must re-examine how we live as Catholics committed to following our Lord and walking in his footsteps. Lent gives us an opportunity to nourish our interior lives and to renew our commitment to living the Gospel.

The disciplines of prayer, fasting and almsgiving should be an integral part of daily Christian living year-round. However, we are invited to pay special attention to them during this penitential time in order to ready ourselves for participation in the paschal mystery during Holy Week and Easter.

Lent is a time for repentance, renewal and revitalization. This is the time when the whole Church pauses and reflects on the importance of spiritual vitality. This is the time when we are encouraged to ask: How can we reignite the light of Christ? Has our “light” gone out? Or become dim? If so, the disciplines of Lent provide us with simple, but effective ways to rejuvenate our spirits and to prepare for the joy of Easter.

As we continue this holy season of Lent, let’s allow God to renew us spiritually and resist the temptation to settle for ways of living that are unworthy of missionary disciples of Jesus Christ.

—Daniel Conway