Ash Wednesday 2022

            We have all been here before unless you are not yet Catholic. Lent! A time of purification, a time of penance, a time of tearing our hearts open and letting God find us where we are and touch us with His grace.

            Lent is an invitation to do that that, opening our hearts and allowing God to touch us, thereby becoming holy as God is holy. How do we touch the inner source from which flows all that is good, all that is beautiful, all that is redeeming? The prophet Joel, in our first reading, tell us to do it with our own hearts, tearing them open that God might touch us with is transforming power.

            Lent is a time to develop a personal, loving, intimate relationship with God. When our hearts are clearly focused on Jesus, seeing what he does, hearing what he says, staying with him as he is tormented by words, rejected by friends, tortured, and killed for his fidelity to God and his love for us, then our hearts in turn will be transformed by so much love. Then, where the heart is compelled to be through love, the head must follow with decisions.

            Penance has a purpose if it helps make a place for God in our lives. Our hearts will not have a place in which to draw in the mind and heart of Jesus unless we fast from those things that otherwise fill up our days. One half-hour of television given up reading the Scriptures or some other spiritual reading can be a start in getting to know the God who loves us so much.

            To give alms with a direct intention to recognize the suffering body of Jesus in the one we help will help us to experience, in our own insideness, the compassion and mercy of God. These are internal changes usually done in secret, but intense passion for what we love is hard to hide. Others will not be asking “Where is your God?” for they will recognize the divine goodness in your heart.

            Lent is not meant to be a time of misery, hopelessness, and despair. But a time to refocus, get our spiritual lives in order and open our hearts to the love and mercy of a God who love us so much that He sent His own Son to die for our sins, that we may have new life.