With Ash Wednesday, we once again begin the season of Lent when as a way to pursue spiritual growth, self-reflection and preparation for Easer, we are encouraged to go through the process of repentance and conversion, deepening our relationship with God through prayer, fasting and self-discipline, and focusing on caring for the poor and the marginalized.
Lent can be regarded as a journey towards Easter that helps us to renew our faith so as to prepare us for the celebration of Christ’s resurrection. It also helps us to grow in holiness, striving for spiritual maturity by becoming more and more like Christ.
Lent can motivate us to grow in humility, strengthening our dependence on God. It stimulates the desire to build habits that lead to spiritual growth by developing self-discipline. It, of course, spurs us to deepen our love for God, focusing on what truly matters.
This liturgical season of Lent highlights a basic need, that of conversion, from the inmost part of our being, our heart and mind, to the most social and global dimension of our life.
This is the be-all and end-all of Lent, supposed to be a permanent feature in our consciousness, not to serve as a wet blanket, but rather as a stimulus for us to return to the orbit proper to us. It’s like a corrective maintenance for us.
We have to be wary of the many factors, especially in our current culture and world environment, that tend to weaken our awareness of this need, and even to distort and annul it.
We have been warned so many times before by saints and Church leaders that our sense of sin down the ages has been quite skewed and left out of sync with our faith in God’s plan for us.
Directly said, we need conversion because we have fallen away from our God, our Creator and Father. Yes, it’s time to remind ourselves that we come from God, not just from dust, and that we are meant to live our life with him and to return to him.
Lent is a time to recall how sin entered into the world, how it tampered with our nature and our life, how it has been cured, and how we can attain that cure. In a manner of speaking, Lent supplies a crucial missing link in the understanding of our life.
It gives us a more complete and realistic picture of our life, since we tend to disregard some not-so-pleasant aspects of it. Thus, it’s not just dark and hard things that it connotes. It actually points to a human triumph, to joy and peace.
This is because while Lent tells us to grapple with sin and everything that it involves—temptations, effects and structures of sin from the personal level up to the most social and global level—it also reassures us of victory due to God’s endless mercy.
Lent guides us through the way of conversion and transformation, from sin to grace, from moral anemia to radiating vitality, from spiritual death to life. It teaches us that with grace we have to undertake ascetical struggle.
“Where sin abounded, grace abounded even more,” St. Paul tells us. (Rom 5,20) Many other references in the Gospel give us reasons to be hopeful and optimistic about our human condition that is immersed in sin.
Our sins, failures and weaknesses should not be a deterrent in our relationship with God. With faith in God’s mercy, with humility, we can make them an occasion to get to God even more closely. He always waits for us and is very eager to forgive us. (Fr. Roy Cimagala)
