lent – Page 4 – Communio

Temptation of the Lord, and ours

Today in the Ordinary Form and the Extraordinary Form of the Mass we hear the gospel narrative of Jesus being tempted by Satan. Even Satan tries to lure the Son of God away from the center. The fact that Satan attempts to make another offer to the Lord whom he knows of his origin ought to indicate to us that we are also under attack. The preparation of Lent for Easter exactly poses for us a renewal of faith in the One to whom we owe everything. At the Easter Vigil we will renew our baptismal vows rejecting sin and the temptations of Satan.

The First Sunday of Lent poses for us the same question Jesus was confronted: to whom do you belong? Obviously, Jesus knew to whom He belonged, but do we?

When faced with personal temptation can we say with Jesus, “Get away, Satan! It is written: The Lord, your God, shall you worship and him alone shall you serve.”

A reflection by Saint Gregory Nazianzen reminds us of a central aspect of our baptism:

We must not expect baptism to free us from the temptations of our persecutor. The body that concealed him made even the Word of God a target for the enemy; his assumption of a visible form made even the invisible light an object of attack. Nevertheless, since we have at hand the means of overcoming our enemy, we must have no fear of the struggle. Flaunt in his face the water and the Spirit… Strong in our baptism each of us can say ‘I too am made in the image of God, but unlike you, I have not yet become an outcast from heaven through my pride. I have put on Christ; by my baptism I have become one with him. It is you that should fall prostrate before me!’

Fasting was instituted by Our Lord

Yesterday for Ash Wednesday, I proposed that we listen to the words of Saint John Chrysostom on the subject of fasting. Perhaps a more modern person, Saint Francis de Sales, is in order for fasting as a key discipline of Lent. De Sales preached the following. Thanks to Dom Hugh for bringing this excerpt to light which bears a little reflection form us all:

To treat of fasting and of what is required to fast well, we must, at the start, understand that of itself fasting is not a virtue. The good and the bad, as well as Christians and pagans, observe it. The ancient philosophers observed it and recommended it. They were not virtuous for that reason, nor did they practice virtue in fasting. Oh, no, fasting is a virtue only when it is accompanied by conditions which render it pleasing to God. Thus it happens that it profits some and not others, because it is not undertaken by all in the same manner… We know very well that it is not enough to fast exteriorly if we do not also fast interiorly and if we do not accompany the fast of the body with that of the spirit…

We must fast with our whole heart, that is to say, willingly, wholeheartedly, universally and entirely. If I recount to you St. Bernard’s words regarding fasting, you will know not only why it is instituted but also how it ought to be kept.

He says that fasting was instituted by Our Lord as a remedy for our mouth, for our gourmandizing, and for our gluttony. Since sin entered the world through the mouth, the mouth must do penance by being deprived of foods prohibited and forbidden by the Church, abstaining from them for the space of forty days. But this glorious saint adds that, as it is not our mouth alone which has sinned, but also all our other senses, our fast must be general and entire, that is, all the members of our body must fast. For if we have offended God through the eyes, through the ears, through the tongue, and through our other senses, why should we not make them fast as well? And not only must we make the bodily senses fast, but also the soul’s powers and passions — yes, even the understanding, the memory, and the will, since we have sinned through both body and spirit.

Ash Wednesday, 1622

One Human Family, Food for All

An international —and personal, because it touches the conscience— issue which plagues all people no matter of faith is that of hunger. It is a wretched thing to be without food even for a night. Some 800 million do not have sufficient food. How can I share, live in justice and care for the other person?

As President of Caritas Internationalis Oscar Cardinal Rodríguez Maradiaga SDB, wrote a letter recently from which I excerpted the following:

Caritas Internationalis launched the ‘One Human Family, Food for All’ campaign before Christmas. The campaign offers an opportunity to answer Pope Francis’s invitation.

We believe that it is a fundamental injustice that over 800 million people in the world are hungry. These people wouldn’t be hungry if there were greater equality in wealth and resources were shared more fairly. Each of us can live more simply, consume less, waste less and be more conscious of our choices. Sharing – our bread, our resources, ourselves – is the cornerstone of our faith and a solution to global hunger.

In the run up to Lent here in Rome, all the children dress up for the tradition of ‘carnivale’. The face of Jesus Christ is also present in many guises and we may not recognise him at first glance. We may ignore his call if we’re not attentive. “He does not reveal himself cloaked in worldly power and wealth but rather in weakness and poverty,” said Pope Francis.

Lent is a call to taste people’s hunger and touch their poverty with our very fingers. It is a time to join hands with our brothers and sisters who are part of the 3.5 billion poor in the world. As the Americans would say, it’s time to “do the math”.

Please support the Caritas One Human Family, Food for All campaign to eliminate global hunger by 2025. You can act by donating online at www.caritas.org or by doing something large or small in your community to help the poor and vulnerable.

Can we support the Caritas Internationalis campaign ‘One Human Family: Food for All’, working towards ending hunger by 2025?

Ash Wednesday

For 40 days we enter into a period of fasting and prayer just as the Lord did in the wilderness, facing the Evil One, in preparation for his public ministry. The hallmarks, to be effective, have to sting a little. Prayer, fasting and the act of almsgiving ought to be intensified since these things are done throughout the year. That is, I need to be personally involved in lenten practices and we ought to feel the sacrifice of time, the intellect, and the will. The journey of faith is none other than fighting with sin and accepting the sovereignty of God in and over our life. We call this a journey for a precise reason: we are never finished turning our life with the help of grace to the Author of Life. In time it is hoped, that our measure is replaced by Christ’s, the influence of the powers-that-be is changed to the influence of the Messiah. Lent is the yearly reminder that heaven is our goal, the joy of new life is given to us because this is God’s desire for us. Zero-in on the Lord’s Passion and receive the gift of resurrection. Pope Francis said today in Rome,

Ash Wednesday, begins our Lenten journey of penance, prayer and conversion in preparation for the Church’s annual celebration of the saving mysteries of Christ’s passion, death and resurrection. In these days the Church asks us to ponder with joy and gratitude God’s immense love revealed in the paschal mystery and to live ever more fully the new life we have received in Baptism. This journey of spiritual renewal in the footsteps of Christ also calls us to acknowledge and respond to the growing spiritual and material poverty in our midst. Specifically, it means consciously resisting the pressure of a culture which thinks it can do without God, where parents no longer teach their children to pray, where violence, poverty and social decay are taken for granted. May this Lent, then, be a time when, as individuals and communities, we heed the words of the Gospel, reflect on the mysteries of our faith, practice acts of penance and charity, and open our hearts ever more fully to God’s grace and to the needs of our brothers and sisters.

Since I like the Church Fathers, it seems that St. Maximus the Confessor has something to say to us:

God’s will is to save us, and nothing pleases him more than our coming back to him with true repentance. The heralds of truth and the ministers of divine grace have told us this from the beginning, repeating it in every age. Indeed, God’s desire for our salvation is the primary and preeminent sign of his infinite goodness, and it was precisely in order to show that there is nothing closer to God’s heart that the divine Word of God the Father, with untold condescension, lived among us in the flesh, and that he died, suffered, and said all that was necessary to reconcile us to God.

The wisdom of trusted Fathers of the Church s helpful:

The life of a monk [actually, use Christian] ought to be a continuous Lent. Since few, however, have the strength for this, we urge the entire community during these days of Lent to keep its manner of life most pure and to wash away in this holy season the negligences of other times. This we can do in a fitting manner by refusing to indulge evil habits and by devoting ourselves to prayer with tears, to reading, to compunction of heart and self-denial. During these days, therefore, we will add to the usual measure of our service something by way of private prayer and abstinence from food or drink, so that each of us will have something above the assigned measure to offer God of his own will with the joy of the Holy Spirit. In other words, let each one deny himself some food, drink, sleep, needless talking and idle jesting, and look forward to holy Easter with joy and spiritual longing. (Rule of St. Benedict)

Growing in Freedom through forgiveness beginning in Lent

The Christian approach is to “give something up” for Lent as a way change one’s sinfulness to a life of holiness. At least that’s the hope. Typically we fail pretty early in our lenten practices because the sting of the sacrifice is not really present in the way we live and we don’t see the point. Our walk with Jesus Christ has to be more than a Cadbury Easter Egg. What are you are you giving up for Lent? And, why? What is driving you to give up thus-and-such for Lent? Can mercy be a real way of living for you?

In what ways would your life be different if you made an offering to God that included giving up several unseemly attitudes that if you were serious your life would be fundamentally happier?

Forgiveness is God’s gift to us. Will we receive this gift and share it with others? Forgiveness means everything…it is the method of living the proclamation of the Gospel. Forgiveness always a new day to us to live in freedom and it takes us out of the ghetto called religion.

Here’s a proposal of letting go:

Arrogance, intellectual and affective
Blame, bitterness and resentment
Doubt in faith, hope and love
Envy and excuses
Fear of failure, lack of courage
Feelings of unworthiness and guilt
Gossip and negativity
Impatience with self and others
Lack of counsel
Preferring other things to Christ
Presumption, pride and worry: thinking that God is on my side at all times for all reasons
Refusing the hand offered in friendship
Refusing to honor the other person
Refusing to have mercy on others
Self-pity
Sense of entitlement and a spirit of consumerism.

Lenten penance according to St Augustine: fast from discord, and forgive

For anyone still deciding what to give up for Lent, (Ash Wednesday is around the corner) or even for those who have decided, here’s a great suggestion from Saint Augustine that may be helpful:

“Before everything else, brothers and sisters, fast from quarrels and discord…. If you want to shout, use the kind of shouting about which [Scripture] says, ‘With my voice I shouted to the Lord’ {Psalm 142.1}. That indeed is not a shout of quarreling, but of loving; not of flesh, but the heart….

Forgive, and you will be forgiven; give, and it will be given to you’ {Luke 6.37-38}. These are the two wings of prayer, on which it flies to God; if you pardon the offender what has been committed, and give to the person in need.”

[Sermon 205, On the Beginning of Lent]

Christ the reconciler

When you attend and pray Holy Mass today you’ll likely notice that Catholics are moving toward Ash Wednesday, March 5. As you know, Ash Wednesday marks the opening of the penitential season, a time of preparation for the annual remembering and living more intensely our faith (anamnesis in technical terms) of the Paschal Mystery of Jesus: His life, death, resurrection and Ascension.

Today, the Catholic Church has various liturgical observances for the Sunday celebration of Mass. The Ordinary Form of the Mass celebrates the 6th Sunday of the Year, the Extraordinary Form of the Mass marks today as Septuagesima Sunday (that is, 70 days before Easter). Our Eastern Catholic sisters and brothers have various ways to mark the preparation for Easter.

Lent has developed over the centuries from the earliest times of Christianity and what is now spoken of as the ashes of penitence and the period of time were given to the Church in the 6th and 7th centuries. The Extraordinary Form of the Mass, for example, maintains three Sundays preceding Ash Wednesday called Septuagesima, Sexagesima, and Quinquagesima, that is respectively, the seventieth, sixtieth, and fiftieth days before Easter Sunday. The Ordinary Form of the Mass has dropped these preparatory Sundays thus isolating the tradition of preparing for Lent seen in the older form of the Mass and what is lived by the Eastern Churches. Nevertheless, these numbers help us to use the Scriptures in an Old Testament typological way. The Old Testament informs, prepares and opens us up to the work of the Messiah. Hence we say that the number seventy recalls for us the seventy years of the Jewish people living in exile in Babylon. Upon hearing this we ask, how do we live in exile from the fullness of communion with God? What is pondered in the sacred Liturgy is pondered in our personal life. The First Sunday of Lent, Quadragesima, is the beginning of the Lenten fast of forty days.

Since most Catholics will hear the gospel Matthew (5:17–37) for the 6th Sunday through the Year, here is a reflection taken from Saint John Chrysostom:

“Christ gave his life for you, and do you hold a grudge against your fellow servant? How then can you approach the table of peace? Your Master did not refuse to undergo every kind of suffering for you, and will you not even forgo your anger? Why is this, when love is the root, the wellspring and the mother of every blessing? ‘He has offered me an outrageous insult’, you say, ‘he has wronged me times without number, he has endangered my life’. Well, what is that? He has not yet crucified you as the Jewish elders crucified the Lord. If you refuse to forgive your neighbor’s offense your heavenly Father will not forgive your sins either. What does your conscience say when you repeat the words: ‘Our Father who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name’, and the rest? Christ went so far as to offer his blood for the salvation of those who shed it. What could you do that would equal that? If you refuse to forgive your enemy you harm not him but yourself…The reason the Son of God came into the world was to reconcile the human race with the Father. As Paul says: ’Now he has reconciled all things to himself, destroying enmity in himself by the cross’. Consequently, as well as coming himself to make peace he also calls us blessed if we do the same, and shares his title with us. ‘Blessed are the peacemakers’, he says, ‘for they shall be called children of God’. So as far as a human being can, you must do what Christ the Son of God did, and become a promoter of peace both for yourself and for your neighbor. Christ calls the peacemaker a child of God. The only good deed he mentions as essential at the time of sacrifice is reconciliation with one’s brother or sister. This shows that of all the virtues the most important his love.”

Francis’ homily for Holy Thursday 2013

Lent ends and the sacred Triduum begins with the Mass of Our Lord’s Supper, with the rite of Washing of Feet (known also as the Mandatum). In Rome, the Pope offered Mass at the Casal del Marmo, an inner city detention center. In the chapel dedicated to the title of “Father of Mercies,” were 40 young detainees gathered around him for Mass, 12 youth, Catholics and non-Christians, 2 of whom were young women and 2 Muslims, had their feet washed by the Pontiff. Concelebrating the Mass were Cardinal Agostino Vallini (the Pope’s Vicar for the Diocese of Rome), Archbishop Giovanni Angelo Becciu (‘Substitute for General Affairs of the Secretary of State), Monsignor Alfred Xuereb, (Chaplain to the Casal del Marmo, and papal secretary), 2 deacons, one deacon from the Seminario San Carlo (the Seminary of the Fraternity of St Charles Borromeo) and another, Brother Roi Jenkins Albuen, a Capuchin of the “Addolorata” with Father Gaetano Greco. Also there were two young seminarians from the Roman Seminary with the assistant chaplain, Colombian Father Pedro Acosta.

Pay attention to what the Pope says!!!! Also, some photos.

Here’s Vatican Radio transcript and translation of the Holy Father’s unscripted homily:

“This is moving, Jesus washes the feet of his disciples. Peter understands nothing. He refuses but Jesus explains to him. Jesus, God did this, and He Himself explains it to the disciples.. ‘Do you realize what I have done for you? You call me ‘teacher’ and ‘master,’ and rightly so, for indeed I am. If I, therefore, the master and teacher, have washed your feet, you ought to wash one another’s feet. I have given you a model to follow, so that as I have done for you, you should also do’.

Continue reading Francis’ homily for Holy Thursday 2013

The contrite heart

The conversion we have entered into this lent, in a full way I hope according to circumstances, likely to be an intense experience this week. Holy Week is a rather unique experience for each of us that works on us, and it is a work in which we have to engage in.

Some years I find myself happy with what has been accomplished, and others, not so. Much of this judgment is based on the awareness of the context in which we find ourselves: health and sickness, wealth and poverty, power and weakness, intellectually sensitive and those living with diseases of the mind.

Whatever it is that captures our heart, whatever ambit it is that we find ourselves. Dying to self, I have to recognize is not done on my own terms.

“Let us acquire a contrite heart, a soul humbled in mind, and a heart that by means of tears and repentance is pure from every stain and defilement of sin. So shall we too be found worthy in due time quickly to rise to such heights that even hear and now we may see and enjoy the ineffable blessings of the divine light, if not perfectly, at least in part, and to the extent to which we are able. So shall we both unite ourselves to God, and God will be united to us. The to those who come near us we shall become ‘light’ and ‘salt’ (cf. Mt. 5:13-14) to their great benefit in Christ Jesus our Lord.”

St. Symeon the New Theologian, The Discourses, (Paulist Press, 202-203)

Spy Wednesday

Spy Wednesday, Wednesday in Holy Week, is unique as the sacred Liturgy prepares us to pray the sacred Triduum in a more devoted, sincere way. The gospel for today unfolds the drama. Hence, Spy Wednesday a pious way to commemorate and remind ourselves how, why and for what Judas Iscariot’s betrayal of Jesus for thirty pieces of silver is a learning experience for each of us. The betrayal of Jesus by Judas –a friend of the Lord’s, a member of the 12 Apostles, a man responsibility– continues until today to make us pause and to ask what happened; Judas’ tortured ending grieve us.

The mystery of the dramatic events concerning Judas and Jesus shows us the value God places on the gift of free will. The sinfulness of some of our choices are too often motivated by money, power, and fame, the desire to be right on everything, to point fingers without looking deeply within our selves. Consider the various things Pope Francis has said since his election about the devil and his enticements. In the Liturgy we pray for the grace to have the power of the enemy driven from us thus attaining the grace of the resurrection.

Continue reading Spy Wednesday