<\/p>\n
Let’s face it: many Christians find Lent meaningless. There are some among us who get their ashes, make some crazy resolution –give up the daily consumption of 5 beers, are nice to a sibling, do homework– to make “penance” and the season of Lent more “holy.” \u00a0Silly things at Lent beget shallow experiences of conversion, perhaps even lend to a falsification of the Christian witness at during the time of Lent. Read the Pope’s lenten addresses an see what he has to say about the nature of this season we call purposeful, holy, penitential, even great. He would agree with me (wow that could be dangerous!) that unless you take Christ seriously who is standing in front of you in the person of your neighbor, Lent is going to be boring and miserable. How pure is your love for Jesus? How does your love for Jesus made real, concrete, fruitful? The following 3 paragraphs may begin to help answer these questions. Emphasis mine.<\/i><\/p>\n
Christ attracts\u00a0me primarily through things and people<\/b>. My wounded, tired soul could stop at\u00a0that. Idolatry is nothing other than to confuse the creature with the Creator,\u00a0which is why there is a continual need for the purification of love.<\/p>\n
My\u00a0comments here come directly from a saying of Fr. Giussani that I have referred\u00a0to many, many times and that, in the book I wrote about him, I cited as one of\u00a0the loftiest, most impressive and truly innovative points in the Church’s recent
\nhistory:\u00a0the definition of virginity as distance in possession<\/i>, or possession\u00a0that includes distance in it. We must take this expression in its entirety. In\u00a0it is the exaltation of the human in Christ, which so characterized Fr.\u00a0Giussani’s entire life, and the\u00a0inevitability of sacrifice<\/i>, which he always\u00a0cited as the condition of the road.\u00a0No one wants to do away with or repress\u00a0friendship and sentiments, or to put them “in parentheses”<\/i>, but we must be very\u00a0clear and ask ourselves:\u00a0what does God want of me?<\/b>\u00a0And what does that mean for\u00a0the other, in light of the road that God has assigned to him?<\/p>\n
Christ is not\u00a0paradoxical<\/b>.\u00a0Christ gives us an abundance of human affections to help us to\u00a0understand what it means to love him<\/b>. It doesn’t scandalize me when someone\u00a0says: “It seems that I love that person more than I love Jesus”, because our\u00a0path towards the Infinite is without end, and, before you love the God that you\u00a0don’t see, you love the neighbor that you see. But\u00a0love the neighbor that you\u00a0see so as to walk toward God, to walk toward the fullness of yourself.<\/p>\n
An excerpt from an address tilted, “Our Fulfillment” by Father Massimo Camisasca, founder of the\u00a0<\/i>Fraternity of Saint Charles<\/i><\/a><\/strong>.\u00a0<\/i><\/p>\n The Fraternity is\u00a0an international missionary congregation of priests begun in 1985 as a response to the work of Monsignor Luigi Giussani. The Fraternity has about 100 priests in 20 countries and 30 in formation to be ordained priests. To read the rest of the address,\u00a0<\/i>click here<\/i><\/b><\/a>.<\/i><\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Let’s face it: many Christians find Lent meaningless. There are some among us who get their ashes, make some crazy resolution –give up the daily consumption of 5 beers, are nice to a sibling, do homework– to make “penance” and the season of Lent more “holy.” \u00a0Silly things at Lent beget shallow experiences of conversion, … Continue reading Purifying our love<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[49],"tags":[1953],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/communio.stblogs.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25360"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/communio.stblogs.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/communio.stblogs.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/communio.stblogs.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/communio.stblogs.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=25360"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/communio.stblogs.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25360\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":29011,"href":"https:\/\/communio.stblogs.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25360\/revisions\/29011"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/communio.stblogs.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=25360"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/communio.stblogs.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=25360"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/communio.stblogs.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=25360"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}