Message from Associate Pastor Fr. Renzo Rosales, S.J.
Lent: A Time of Preparation with Prayer, Fasting and Charity
We enter the month of March shortly after the beginning of the Lenten season. The word Lent is derived from the Anglo-Saxon words lencten, which means “Spring,” and lenctentid, which means not only “Springtide” but also was the word for “March,” the month in which most of Lent falls.
In Spanish the word for Lent is Cuaresma, which is an abbreviation of the Latin expression quadragésima die which in modern English is said fortieth day, is a time that covers 40 days plus 6 Sundays, from Ash Wednesday to Holy Thursday, , when we begin the Easter Triduum, which concludes with the Easter Vigil, the most important Mass of the Liturgical Year where we proclaim the Resurrection of our Lord Jesus Christ.
In the Bible, the number 40 is mentioned to indicate a long time for purification, contact with God, trial, or fasting: the 40 days and 40 nights that the universal flood lasted (Genesis 7:11-12), the 40 days that Moses spent on Mount Sinai to receive the commandments (Exodus 24:18), the 40 years that the people of Israel spent moving through the desert (Numbers 32:13). For 40 days and 40 nights the prophet Elijah walked to Mount Horeb, also known as Sinai, (I Kings 19:8), and 40 is the number of days that Jesus fasted in the desert after being baptized by John Baptist and faced the temptations of the devil (Matthew 4:2). For us Catholic Christians, this is the season of the liturgical year when the Church begins to contemplate, with special devotion, the events surrounding the passion, death and, finally, resurrection of Jesus Christ.
During the season of Lent, the Church invites us the faithful to create the interior climate that facilitates that journey with Jesus in his passion through prayer, fasting and charity. If we pay attention, each of these activities aim to deepen our relationships on three levels: with God, with ourselves, and with others.
Prayer is that dialogue with God, whether it is using our own words, relying on learned prayers, or the psalms and passages of the Bible. By persisting in prayer, we create the inner climate that helps us to refine our ability to listen and relate more intimately to God by expressing our joys, hopes, fears or sufferings.
With fasting we create an inner discipline to control those physical and even emotional appetites that sometimes tend to get out of control and affect or condition of our decisions. With the help of willpower, and strengthened by prayer, the church invites us to abstain or deprive ourselves of something of importance to us and thus foster a healthier relationship with ourselves. The most traditional and common practice is to abstain from eating meat on Fridays. In addition to this practice, common to Catholics, each of us can decide to deprive ourselves of other things to which we have developed some kind of attachment: a certain type of food or drink, casino games (or video games), excessive use of cell phones, dependence on social media, talking without reflecting or listening, etc.
Finally, with acts of charity, we ensure that Lent is not a time of exclusively individualistic deepening focused on our relationship with ourselves and with God. It is necessary that every deepening of these relationships leads us to a deepening of our relationships with our fellow men. Actions such as offering cash and other donations to the Church, offering our moral or material support to people in need, offering my time to give encouragement and comfort to people in need, offering my time to give encouragement and comfort to people who are going through difficult situations, are examples of acts of charity.
May we live this Lent with a true desire to penetrate more deeply into the knowledge of Jesus, through our readings, reflections, prayers and actions, in order – as St. Ignatius says – to love and follow him more.
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