Welcome to Lent, a short season of the Church’s year that seems so long! Lent is the penitential season of prayer, self-examination and repentance. It is the season, which prepares us for the celebration of Easter and the joy of an encounter with the risen Lord.
Like the Lord in today’s Gospel, we are led forth with a force, which we cannot resist, pushed into the desert by the Holy Spirit for the next 40 days to deepen and to fortify our relationship with God. The desert is the most barren and arid place on earth. It lacks water and food, the two necessary things to survive. The desert symbolizes death, the consequence of sin, and the result of choosing ourselves over God. It is the perfect place to spend Lent.
So, each year we retreat into the desert for forty days for personal conversion and preparation to celebrate the great mysteries of our redemption during Holy Week and Easter. It is a graced time each year. It takes effort and firm resolve of our will to keep Lent. Like anything, which is good and important, it is well worth the effort and pain.
Although redeemed, as we are by Christ’s sacrifice, we still must struggle to overcome the personal sins in our lives. It is a life-long challenge. Every year we have the grace to overcome sin in our life. The Church in her wisdom gives us three spiritual tools to do just that: Prayer, Fasting and Almsgiving. Prayer takes time, Fasting produces a hunger and Almsgiving limits our personal desires. These Lenten practices strike at the heart of our self-centeredness, the cause of our sins.
Prayer. To pray better and deeper we must surrender our time, our most prized possession. We must give up some TV or entertainment time, or surfing the Internet time, or ‘me’ time. Perhaps we need to get up earlier in the day, and spend the first hour of the day with God. To pray from the Bible, or another spiritual book, to attend daily Mass, or Stations of the Cross, to pray the rosary or Divine Mercy chaplet, to meditate on the Gospels
Fasting. We deliberately set aside what satisfies us so that we can experience our deeper hunger: God. Fasting is an abstinence of things we enjoy. We should enjoy the goods of the earth, yet these goods can consume us, and even become the object of sinful pride. By temporarily renouncing these goods through fasting, we willingly suffer their absence. We control our desires, and not let our desires control us. There is no doubt that fasting is difficult, it takes discipline, it hurts us, but, like the pain from physical exercise, it is supposed to hurt. The rewards are well worth it.
Almsgiving. We give alms not only because others need assistance (they do!), but also because we need to abandon portions of what makes us feel self-sufficient. Our giving must be deliberate. It should pinch us a bit, to remind us of our ultimate poverty and what makes for true wealth.
Challenging our Lenten observance will be the constant distractions, our electronic toys, the temptation to give up, and questioning why are we doing this?, sadly pushing the practices of our faith to the fringes of our lives. Don’t make your Lenten practices just another thing in the midst of a busy day.
The desert is the place for Lent because it is a place of abstinence; its emptiness reminds us that the things of the earth ultimately cannot satisfy us. Our true fulfillment is God, who in the resurrection leads us out of the desert and into the Garden of Paradise.